Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/04/five-young-teens-save-an-8-yea.html
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14 Likes
I’m not much of a skier, but the handful of times I’ve been on those chair lifts I’ve always been surprised by the complete lack of safety features. I live in NorCal and a kid from my town died a few years ago having fallen from one of these.
7 Likes
There isn’t a complete lack of safety equipment, I mean there is that wobbly bar after all.
I’m more concerned that the operator was so blatantly negligent in his job. Their primary job is to watch and make sure people get seated properly. Instead a customer had to shout over the music to get him to do his job.
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Free passes for a year? Should be for a lifetime. The resort is responsible for negligent operation that could have led to a fatality which would have cost them millions. These kids saved their ass.
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The engineers behind the newer gen lifts are getting more and more safety-conscious, but, yeah, the mass of them out there today were designed in a different time, when safety was not “no. 1 priority”.
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The kids are gonna be okay 
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Nice quick thinking there, boys! It always takes too long for the rescue ostrich to arrive.
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Unless we kill them all by voting to protect our oh-so-fragile egos.
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With those attitudes towards safety, they might be the same thing.
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The chair lifts are pretty safe. According to this, there have been only about 25 fatalities in chair lift accidents since 1945:
https://alp-age.com/en/articles/51/326/
Lift accidents with gondolas have caused many more deaths, which fits well with my personal experience of feeling much more unsafe boarding a gondola than a chair lift.
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So what you’re saying is it’s a win-win for the resort then ‘eh?
1 Like
using the safety fencing as a catch tarp is genius.
he wasn’t really that high up fortunately, otherwise they have to use a special belay system from the wire.
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Is a twelve-year-old a “young teen” or an old tween?
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Nobody died, nobody is pressing a lawsuit, and they rewarded the rescuers with free lift passes (not really denting the profit margin there). So, yeah, win’s for everybody! Except for the dangling kid, who’ll probably never get near a chair lift for the rest of his life.
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Yes 
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Testify. I came here to say just this.
And, good on the teens.
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Yet… …
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That list doesn’t even include the fatality I referenced, so I doubt it’s accuracy. For confirmation, google this and you’ll find it: “A 7-year-old boy who died after falling an estimated 60 feet from a chairlift at Sugar Bowl Ski Resort”. This was 2012. Could be it hadn’t been updated in a while.
It does strike me as one of those things where I can’t believe these types of incidents don’t happen all the time. /shrug.
“People on the ground were staring, not knowing what to do…”
a) Dipshits, all of them. You DO SOMETHING to help the person in danger, that’s what you do. Don’t just fucking stand around staring.
b) Fuck all the people in the world who execute “pranks” that mimic situations like these, and have desensitized everyone else into thinking that dangerous situations are staged or otherwise fake.
c) And super kudos to the rescuing teenagers for (a) not being dipshits, and (b) not being desensitized to real-world danger.
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If you hadn’t been quick enough to think of the stretchy fence idea, what would you have done to help?
Seems more likely to me that people were standing around staring because they couldn’t think of what to do to help, not because they knew what to do and just didn’t want to do it.
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