How safe are ski lifts?

Cable cars have transformed life in the Alps and around the world. But when operating at high altitudes, often in extreme conditions, what does it take to keep them safe?

It's late December and I am at the foot of a ski lift in the Dolomites in northern Italy, with snow-covered peaks looming high above me. Large glass bubbles are gliding peacefully up and down the mountain, suspended from a single steel rope. I am about to board one of them, and learn about the behind-the-scenes repairs that keep them safe. But first, I'll need to take a deep breath – and overcome my own personal terror of this dangling, gravity-defying icon of the Alps.

Cable cars, also known as ropeways, are actually among the safest forms of transport in the world. According to an unpublished global analysis from 2022 by Tüv Süd, a testing and certification company that tests their safety around the world, riding a cable car is more than ten times safer than travelling by car, and is even safer than flying. Comparing the number of fatalities for every 100 million hours of travel, for every 25 fatalities from car accidents, and 16 from flying, there are only two from cable car accidents, according to the analysis, which is based on data from more than 20 members of the International Meeting of Technical Authorities for Cableways (ITTAB). Most of the cable car accidents were caused by passenger behaviour, according to the analysis.

Official data from Switzerland, home to around 2,400 cable cars, supports this picture. For the past three decades, the number of deaths from aerial cable car accidents ranges from between zero and three per year. Urban cable cars are also on the rise globally, as a green transport solution for traffic-clogged cities, especially in Latin America.

Still, I'm not the only one who feels a bit nervous at the idea of dangling from a rope, high above the ground. And when something does go wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic. In 2023, two of the steel ropes supporting a cable car cabin in Pakistan snapped, and the passengers had to be evacuated by helicopter. In 2021, 14 passengers died in a cable car crash in Italy when a rope snapped and their cabin plunged to the ground. This year, in Austria, a gondola plummeted after a tree fell on a rope. The basic set-up – a cabin or chair carrying people is clamped to a moving rope, which runs over wheels attached to pylons – can look inherently precarious. But as cable car experts emphasise, the mechanism as such is actually very robust. It's how it's cared for that makes the difference.

"Cable car technology is relatively old, more than 100 years old, and while there's been a lot of improvement through better materials, and better monitoring technology, the basic principle has remained the same, because it's withstood the test of time," says Ralf Eisinger, a cable car expert at the Institute of Mechanical Handling and Logistics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, whom I speak to after my journey.

Apart from external factors such as something falling on the lift, the main risk to the construction is "human behaviour, actually", says Eisinger, who researches rope technology and also inspects ropes for safety. "For example, I can't blame the technology if I swing a chair lift so wildly that it knocks against something. And the second risk is if the maintenance work is done sloppily, or not done at all."

For my own trip to the top I am accompanied by Manuel Neunhäuserer, the technical director at 3 Zinnen, a company that operates about two dozen ski lifts in the Dolomites – including the Helmjet lift in the ski resort of Sesto/Sexten, which I now step into with a brave smile. It was built in 2020 and will take us up to Mount Elmo, also called Helm in this region, where both Italian and German are used. The sleek new cabin feels reassuring until, shortly into our ride, the lift stops. Some of the ski tourists around us make nervous comments.

"If you're standing still, it's usually not because there's something wrong with the lift," says Neunhäuserer, the only one looking utterly relaxed. "It's mainly because passengers getting on might be having problems, or might need help with small children, and then we stop the lift to make it easier."

Even when a lift stops for a technical reason, such an electrical glitch, it does not affect the safety of passengers in the cabin, he says, whose main risk is hypothermia. After all, we are clamped to the rope, which holds our weight regardless of whether it's moving or not. In the worst case, if the lift is truly stuck, passengers may need to be evacuated – more on the best way to do this later.

Indeed, we start moving again quickly, and within minutes, reach the top and meet Armin Joas, the lift's operations manager. He and his team start every day by testing the entire lift, ticking off several pages of safety checks that include the brakes, pylons and rope tension.

During the day, they constantly monitor the lift as well as the wind, helped by a screen displaying information from sensors monitoring the clamps and rope tension. Strong wind is considered a safety risk. In 2016, tourists in the French Alps had to be rescued from cable cars suspended over a glacier after the ropes became tangled in high winds. Several of the experts I have spoken to report that wind patterns have become less predictable in recent years, which chimes with studies showing that weather is generally becoming more extreme due to climate change and suggesting it is harder to predict.

Before the start of the winter and the summer season, the lift undergoes an especially thorough check-up. Certain parts, such as the wheel set, are dismantled entirely and flown off by helicopter during regular spot checks – an acrobatic job that involves climbing up the pylons and manually unscrewing the parts. Asked what it feels like, Joas grins and replies: "Freedom! You're up there and you feel pure freedom! You can't have vertigo in this job, and as long as you don't have vertigo, it's great."

The secret of a safe rope

Eisinger, the rope researcher, performs similarly gravity-defying feats when he tests cable car ropes for safety. This is done in regular intervals, which can range from every three months to every three years, he says, depending on the age of the rope and how often the lift is used.

To look inside the rope, and not just inspect the surface, a process called magneto-inductive testing is used: a box-like device is put around the rope, the rope is magnetised and its magnetic field measured. A regular signal on the resulting graph indicates that there are no breakages. Sudden spikes may indicate damage such as tiny cracks in a single wire, or a hardened spot caused by a lightning strike, he says. When a signal looks ambiguous, Eisinger climbs onto the rope to take a closer look.

"A steel rope is a very good-natured component, in the sense that it can put up with a lot, and doesn't break quickly," Eisinger says, pointing out that a modern cable car rope is made of up to 300 wires, wound into strands, which are then wound into a rope. "Because there are so many wires, one wire can break, and a second and third one, and it doesn't matter," he says. "That's why the rope is an extremely safe component. Of course, the individual wires eventually break because of age, because they are bent during use. But as long we inspect them regularly, we can predict very exactly when the rope is coming to the end of its natural life."

This predictability is crucial for safety, he says. A steel rope "never breaks suddenly, unless you saw through it", he adds. Instead, once the first wire breakages are detected, it's possible to predict when the rope will have to be repaired or replaced, long before it would actually become unsafe, he says. Strands can be replaced by inserting new ones through an intertwining method called splicing, which is also how the ends of the rope are connected. "A rope never breaks at the spliced section," says Eisinger.

In May 2021, a deadly cable car disaster in Italy showed how vital each safety step is. According to Italian investigators, a rope snapped, and an emergency brake should then have stopped the cabin. A technician admitted deactivating the brake, because he believed it had been malfunctioning. The cable car sped backwards and catapulted off the track rope. The snapped rope had been inspected months before the crash by a maintenance team from Leitner, one of the world's largest manufacturers of cable cars, and nothing irregular was found. An official report on the accident is yet to be published. A preliminary hearing in the trial of six people, along with the company that operated the cable car and Leitner, began this month. A spokesman for Leitner said the company disputes the charges.

How to rescue people from a cable car

On the way down, I am accompanied by Neunhäuserer and Klaus Erharter, technical director at Leitner, which manufactured the cable car we are sitting in (Erharter has no involvement with any aspect of the Italy case). We talk about a subject I deliberately left to the end of the journey: the best way to rescue people from a cable car.

"If there is a technical problem, for example a power cut, there is a special rescue drive with its own power source  to get the cabins back to the stations, and empty the lift," Erharter says. "In absolute emergencies, people are abseiled."

A rescue worker climbs up a pylon, hooks themselves to the rope and zips to the cabin or chair, then straps the trapped passengers to themselves, and abseils. If this is not possible, for example if the cabin is dangling above an area with a high avalanche risk, passengers are taken along the rope to a safe area and then abseiled.

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Erharter says modern lifts have to be built low enough to allow for that rescue method, since the alternative, rescuing people by helicopter, can be difficult or even impossible in some weather conditions. (Though helicopters are sometimes the only way to rescue people from stuck lifts that are high up, and are also used to winch people after they are abseiled to help them off the mountain).

"When the weather is nice, like today, we can use the helicopter, because it's much faster [than abseiling each person]," says Neunhäuserer. "But it's not part of the fundamental rescue plan because in an emergency, the helicopter may not be able to fly. And the probability is quite high that if there is a problem with a lift, the weather conditions aren't that good, either, and that there's a lot of snow, a lot of ice and a lot of fog."

To my surprise, I genuinely enjoy the journey down, sit back, and marvel at the majestic panorama. In the Alps, cable cars are ubiquitous, and children in remote areas even use them to commute to school. Without them, ski tourism would be a niche pursuit for a few intrepid enthusiasts willing to walk to the top. Learning more about all the work behind the scenes has made me appreciate the ingenuity of this invention, and there is something wonderful about gliding through the air on a cloudless winter day. If I ever do get stuck, I'll try to remember Joas's advice: "Keep calm. And enjoy the view."

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