- During the 2007/2008 ski season, California’s ski resorts logged an estimated 7.2 million skier visits. In comparison, Colorado’s ski resorts had 12.54 million skier visits, Vermont had 4.4 million skier visits and Utah had 4.25 million skier visits during the 2007/2008 season. The figures are compiled by industry groups.
- California had 32 ski areas in operation during the 2006/2007 season. By state, New York leads with 50 areas in operation followed by Michigan’s 38 and Wisconsin’s 34. (National Ski Areas Association).
- The average age of skiers and snowboarders rose to 36.6 in the 2006/2007 season, compared with 32.1 in the 1996/1997 season, according to a study by the National Ski Areas Association. Snow riders age 45 and older make up 32 percent of resort visitors compared with 20 percent a decade ago. In comparison, skiers and snowboarders age 10 to 32 dropped from 58 percent of visitors in the 1996/1997 season to 47 percent of visitors last year. (Tahoe Daily Tribune, October 9, 2007).
- The California Ski Industry Association reports that the California winter sports industry generates $500 million annually to the economy, employs 15,000 people, and hosts an average of 8 million skiers seasonally, according to a news release issued by the California Travel and Tourism Commission.
Incidences of Fatal and Serious Accidents
at U.S. Ski Resorts
- During the 2006/2007 ski season, 22 fatalities occurred out of the 55.1 million skier/snowboarder days reported for the season. Eighteen of the fatalities were skiers (15 males, three females) and two of the fatalities were snowboarders, both male. (National Ski Areas Association).
- Most fatalities occur in the same population that engages in high-risk behavior, according to Dr. Jasper Shealy, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who has studied ski-related injuries for more than 30 years. Victims are predominantly male (85 percent) from their late teens to late 30s (70 percent). Less than 10 percent of fatally injured skiers and snowboarders are under 10 or over 50 years of age, but more than 16 percent of all skiers and snowboarders are in these age groups. Most of those fatally injured are usually above-average skiers and snowboarders who are going at high rates of speed on the margins of intermediate trails, according to Dr. Shealy. This is the same population that suffers the majority of unintentional deaths from injury.
- Most fatal accidents occur on well-groomed blue cruiser trails where the average speed of skiers is 25 to 40 miles per hour, according to a recent news article in The Coloradoan.
- Twelve chairlift deaths have occurred since 1973, the latest at Heavenly Valley Ski Resort where 19-year-old Ryan Moore died when he leaned forward on the Dipper Express chair because of a leg cramp and fell nearly 20 feet into rocks below. California law does not require ski resorts to use restraining bars on chairlifts and no resort has mandated it.
- According to a recent article in The Sacramento Bee by Paul Collins, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine, a few things stand out in studies about incidents involving skiers and tree wells:
- Most of them occur within ski area boundaries.
- Many involve people skiing alone.
- Most involve male skiers.
- The snow conditions usually involve recent snowstorms.
- They call could have been rescued has they been found quickly.
- None were able to escape on their own.
- Serious injuries (paraplegics, serious head and other serious injuries) occur at the rate of about 43.7 per year, according to the National Ski Areas Association. In the 2006-2007 season, there were 40 serious injuries. Twenty-four of these serious injuries were skiers (20 males, 4 females) and 16 were snowboarders (14 male, 2 female). The rate of serious injury in 2006-2007 was 0.73 per million skier/snowboarder visits. (National Ski Areas Association).
NOTE: A skier/snowboarder visit represents one person visiting a ski area for all or any part of a day or night and includes full-day, half-day, night, complimentary, adult, child, season and any other ticket types that gives one the use of an area's facility.
- More people are hurt snowboarding than any other outdoor activity, accounting for a quarter of emergency room visits, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. Almost 213,000 people were treated each year in emergency departments for outdoor recreational injuries from 2004 to 2005. Of those injured, about 109,000 (51.5 percent) were young people between the ages of 10 and 24. Snowboarding (25.5 percent), sledding (10.8 percent) and hiking (6.3 percent) are associated with the highest percentage of injuries requiring emergency department visits. To view the press release, visit http://www.cdc.gov/media/ and click on New CDC Study First to Present National Outdoor Recreational Injury Estimates, Press Release, June 10, 2008.
To view The Sacramento Bee news article about the study, visit
http://www.sacbee.com/832/story/1003319.html
- Among skiers and snowboarders, higher speeds and more jumps and acrobatics are leading to a sharp rise in serious head and spinal injuries, according to a systematic review in the December 2007 issue of Injury Prevention. In one study, traumatic brain injury rose from 12 percent to 15 percent among skiers and from 1,000 to 5,200 per year among snowboarders from 1992 to 1997. In another study, spinal cord injury skyrocketed 130 percent among children and 407 percent among adolescents over the 21-year period from 1972-73 to 1993-94. The occurrence rate of both spinal cord and traumatic brain injury appears to be increasing worldwide because of higher speeds and more jumps and acrobatics leading to more falls and collisions, found Charles H. Tator, M.D., Ph.D., of Toronto Western Hospital, and his colleagues.
Source: MedPage Today, December 4, 2007
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/tb/7578
To read the study’s abstract, visit:
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/6/368
- The most common body part injured in snowboarders is the wrist, accounting for 22 percent of all snowboarding injuries. Wrist fractures and sprains were more common in snowboarding novices, in women, and in the younger age groups, while intermediate and more experience snowboarders, especially men, were more likely to experience hand, elbow, and shoulder injuries. (National Safety Council. Sports Participation and Injuries, United States, 2005)
- In recent years, Washoe Medical Center in Reno, which handles all the major injuries from Sierra ski resorts, has seen an average of 250 ski and snowboard trauma patients, according to the hospital’s chief trauma surgeon, Dr. Myron Gomez. This jumped to 309 patients during the 2004/2005 ski season. (Chicago Sun-Times, March 26, 2006)
Actions Taken Following Some
Ski Resort Fatalities
California state regulators fined Mammoth Mountain Ski Area $50,000 for several job safety violations related to the deaths of three ski patrol members on April 6, 2006. The patrolmen were trying to fence off a toxic volcanic vent when the snow collapsed and two of them fell in. A third ski patrol member died while trying to reach his colleagues, and seven more were seriously injured due to the carbon dioxide gas spewing from the vents. A report by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) said the deaths could have been prevented had Mammoth Mountain officials posted enough signs warning about the vent and followed procedures on performing rescues. The report also cited Mammoth Mountain for neglecting to train employees on ways to gauge the danger.
A U.S. Forest Service investigation faulted the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort in Southern Nevada for inadequate avalanche prevention and rescue training in the death of a teenage snowboarder who was swept off a chairlift by a cascade of snow. Allen Brett Hutchison died January 9, 2005. The Forest Service report found that Mount Charleston Resort had not complied with an avalanche control plan, did not have rescue equipment in position and had not adequately prepared employees for search and rescue. According to the Forest Service National Avalanche Center in Ketchum, Idaho, the resort did not have the snow-pack and weather data-gathering and recording tools in place that would have made it more possible to recognize the extraordinary nature of the storm. The forest service closed off the area where the death occurred for five weeks until they were satisfied with ski area safety and avalanche control. The forest district ranger for Mount Charleston said the ski area has the responsibility to ensure safety.
In the wake of a ski death at Arapahoe Basin in May 2005, forest service officials throughout the Rocky Mountains will review snow-safety plans at each ski area to ensure they employ the most current scientific knowledge of the spring snow pack. Fifty-three-year-old David Conway of Boulder was skiing an expert-only run on May 20, 2005, when an avalanche broke loose during a late spring warm spell that snow-safety experts now believe contributed to the snow pack instability. Jim Chalat, a prominent ski-accident attorney representing Conway’s family, did not disclose whether a lawsuit would be filed but said the forest service “snow-safety standards don’t take into account high-altitude areas staying open into May with temperatures remaining below freezing.
In what was described as the highest expressions of corporate responsibility in a long time, the Summit at Snoqualmie in Washington State apologized to the family of 29-year-old David Pettigrew of Issaquah for statements that led the news media to mistakenly conclude that David was responsible for his own death by skiing alone in a roped-off area. Pettigrew was invited to join friends from the Alpental Ski Patrol on a sweep to check for anyone remaining on the slopes as skiing came to an end at Alpental on December 7, 2005. The Summit took out an ad, which stated that David was there at the invitation of the ski patrollers and admitted the area was not closed to David nor was he “out of bounds” as originally inferred. The family prepared a statement, which read: “The Pettigrew family greatly appreciates the acknowledgement by Snoqualmie Summit of the true facts surrounding the accidental death of David Pettigrew.
A California couple considering legal action against the Treble Cone ski field in New Zealand after the death of their 18-year-old son in 2004 will not be able to seek compensation according to a lawyer familiar with the case. Rising ski star Eric Nageotte of South Lake Tahoe was killed when he crashed in an off-piste creek bed after skiing off a groomed trail at speed. The Queenstown Coroner released his findings into the death, which blamed neither Nageotte nor the ski field directly for the accident.
