Ha. Apparently a chair fell off on the rickety ass double chair that goes to the top of the mountian at the local hill here a few days ago... Luckily it was blowing 60, and the lift was closed, but the chair just lost grip on the cable and dropped like a sack of bricks, 46 feet to the snow below. Weird stuff.
Either way... the fact that they had to belay people from 30-40 feet or so is nothing like what happened when the squaw cable car had an accident in the 80's...
^that's a 10" thick cable slicing the cabin in half... at ultra high tension. The lift is a 3 cable design, and the main cable just dropped in the wind. That cabin had to be hundreds of feet up above the ground... which would have either been a massive death cliff, or extremely rugged, rocky terrain.
Ever since this accident, squaw has been ULTRA tentative to run their lifts with high winds... Doesnt help that most of their non-high speed lifts are still old Yans...