The power went off today at about 9:15 for a half hour at Whitewater, leaving skiers stranded on the lifts.
“But now it’s back on and everyone is having a great time out there,” Whitewater’s Rebeckah Hornung told the Star soon after.
Asked how long the mountain will let people sit on lifts before evacuating them, Hornung said preparations for evacuation begin as soon as the power goes off.
“First we go to auxiliary power,” she said, “and run people off at a slower speed.”
At the same time, they prepare to manually evacuate the skiers. This takes about 15 minutes to set in motion, and involves a rope system that rappels skiers to the ground from the lift. This happened during a similar outage last year, also after a big snowfall.
No one was available at FortisBC at press time to explain the reason for the outage or how many other people were affected.