At least eight people were injured on Friday after a malfunctioning ski lift threw people from their seats at a ski resort in Georgia.
Skiers and snowboarders were forced to jump from the faulty chairlift as their seats hurtled backward down the mountain, with some people falling from carriages at speed in what one witness likened to “a scene from a Final Destination film.”
Videos of the accident at Gudauri resort show a pile-up of broken and twisted chairs at the bottom of the lift as bystanders scream at people to jump.
Photo: Reuters / Iryna Iadak via social media
Ryan Wilkinson, 24, was queuing at the bottom of the lift with a group of friends when he saw the incident happen. He said the lift had been closed for repairs all week, but reopened on Friday morning.
“The lift stopped for a minute. There is a language barrier with the Georgians, so we didn’t know what was happening. Then it started reversing backward slowly, then it got quicker. There was a guy in the office smashing on a machine and shouting who seemed powerless to stop it,” he said.
“All the chairs were full of people. Everyone was shouting in Georgian and English for people to jump off. The only thing that stopped it getting worse was the friction caused by the pile-up of chairs at the bottom. People would have kept flying round otherwise,” he added. “One woman in red was too scared to jump. It looked like she’d been spat out of a washing machine when she hit the bottom.”
An emergency stop led to the chairs sliding back at high speed, Georgian Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development Dimitry Kumsishvili told journalists, adding that the incident was “allegedly caused by an electricity outage.”
“The interior ministry has launched a criminal probe into alleged violation of safety norms,” he said.
Georgian Minister of Health, Labor and Social Affairs Davit Sergeenko said the affected tourists — who were Georgiain, Russian, Swedish and Ukrainian — had no serious injuries.
“Two of them, including a pregnant woman from Sweden, were airlifted to a hospital in Tbilisi,” he said.
A spokesperson for Doppelmayr, the Austrian manufacturer of the chairlift, said two technicians were in transit to Georgia to respond to the incident. No initial cause was given.
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