Vancouver View -- Blackcomb Collapse Blamed on Ice

(ATR) A build up of ice was blamed for a Blackcomb Mountain gondola tower breaking in two earlier this week.

Early Tuesday afternoon, the upper part of tower four on the lower Excalibur system detached. Two gondola cars hit the ground below and recoiled, but all vehicles on the line remained attached to the cables. Whistler Blackcomb Senior Vice President of Operations Doug Forseth said at a Wednesday news conference that 53 people were evacuated. A dozen people were treated at the Whistler Medical Centre. The most serious injury was a broken vertebra.

The nearest Olympic venue, the Whistler Sliding Centre, was not affected.

"We don’t know yet and we're still working on understanding why the water was in the tower," said.

The investigation is ongoing, but the British Columbia Safety Authority gave Whistler Blackcomb approval to run the rest of its lifts. Forseth said BCSA inspected Excalibur in October.

Excalibur is one of the two main vertical gondola systems originating from Whistler Village and was built in 1994 by Doppelmayr of Austria. The same company built the new $40 million Peak 2 Peak Gondola which opened Dec. 12 and connects Blackcomb with neighboring Whistler Mountain.

Tuesday's collapse is not the worst accident in Whistler history. On Dec. 23, 1995, four chairs on the Quicksilver lift at Whistler Creekside fell 32 feet to the ground. One man died on the scene while another died two weeks later. One man was left paraplegic. Seven others were also injured.

It took three hours to rescue 170 stranded passengers. The Lift Engineers-built chair was replaced by a Poma-made system in 1996.

Intrawest-owned Blackcomb bought Whistler in 1997.

Intrawest's parent company is the struggling Wall Street hedge fund Fortress Investment Group.

With reporting from Bob Mackin in Vancouver.