MONTREAL -- More than 200 skiers were stuck on a ski lift at the Bromont ski resort, south of Montreal, after a mechanical failure halted services.
The incident happened at 7 p.m. Wednesday. Officials say they tried to resolve the problem for about 90 minutes, and then the skiers were slowly brought down one by one.
“Everyone was calm even though they were waiting three hours,” Carl Beaulieu, who witnessed the incident, but was not on the stalled chairlift, told CTV News.
According to another witness, skiers – including several children – started being helped off the chairlift around 9:30 p.m.
“We arrived at 7 p.m. and when we came back [at 9:12 p.m.] and took the other chairlift that was next to the main one that was jammed, we saw that nothing was being done,” Francis Brault told CTV News. “We were like, 'oh it’s the same people that were there two hours ago.' … We were like, 'well, I don’t know why they’re not doing anything.'”
He adds that even though temperatures weren’t too cold, there was a lot of wind higher up on the mountain.
“They didn’t take people down right away, which I don’t understand. It should have been the priority, in my opinion,” Brault said. “Up there with the wind, it gets pretty cold. We were just up there for a few seconds on the chairlift that was working and we were freezing, so I couldn’t imagine being stuck up there for four hours.”
There were no reported injuries and the resort did not call police reinforcements.
Following the incident, the resort stated on its website Thursday that, “due to a mechanical breakdown, the Express du Village will be temporarily closed.”
