No fatalities have been reported by ski resorts in California

from Rachel BeckerCalMatters

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It’s been a deadly winter on the slopes of California, but the state has no idea how bad it really is.

Just in February, a 21-year-old skier was found dead on a black diamond in Northstar California. Witnesses reported another skier tracked blood down a Mammoth Mountain run. A fatal Northstar collision follows another death in less than two weeks — and that’s before a catastrophic avalanche kills nine skiers near Lake Tahoe.

“There’s no indication that there are more injuries this year than in previous years — just more media coverage around the serious ones,” said John Rice, president of Ski California, an industry association for ski areas in California and Nevada.

He might be right. The problem is, no one can tell right now.

California does not track skiing injuries or deaths at resorts. There is no threshold for injuries on the slopes that would trigger investigation or intervention. And legislative efforts to require reporting of skiing accidents have met with failure after failure.

CalMatters contacted more than two dozen ski resorts listed by Ski California or the US Forest Service operating in the state. None responded with data on incidents, injuries or deaths.

CalMatters also filed a public records request with the U.S. Forest Service, requesting five years of incident reports from at least 24 resorts, according to the agency, that operate on land it manages. A public records specialist said it could take at least six months to process a response, in part because the resorts must first review records to flag anything they consider property.

Without those statistics, ski safety experts, personal injury attorneys and snow scientists wouldn’t be able to tell CalMatters whether the year was particularly dangerous. Whether weather, climate change, terrain or visitor numbers increase or decrease risk. Skiers and snowboarders cannot determine for themselves the relative safety of the slopes they pay to visit.

California Department of Public Health calls injury data is the ‘basis for action’.

Unclear deal

20 years ago, Dan Gregory flew from South Carolina, where he was living at the time, to California, where he planned to go skiing with his 24-year-old daughter, Jessica. When he got off the plane, he learned that she had been in an accident.

Carrying her snowboard on a steep traverse from one lift to another slope at the Alpine Meadows ski resort near Lake Tahoe, Jessica slipped and slid down an icy slope – falling off a cliff with no fences or railings to stop her. Her boyfriend later told Gregory that she had crawled backwards on her stomach, looking at him the whole time.

Jessica Gregory was an animal lover who had started her own dog grooming business in San Francisco. An athlete who biked across the country from Maine to the top of Washington state to raise money for a women’s shelter. She was the only child of her parents.

First Dan and his wife Margaret lost Jessica. then, lost the case Gregory hoped it would stop future incidents. The waiver she had signed dealt a major blow to their case. The gist of the decision: Jessica had accepted the risks.

Gregory disagreed. Without transparency about the accident rate on the tracks, how can anyone really know what they’re getting into?

“They have a moral obligation to fully inform people of the risks they are taking,” Gregory said. “Most people who go skiing on the weekend expect to go home eventually.”

Gregory, a now-retired physician who spent his career in healthcare management, was shocked by the lack of detailed safety information.

He founded SnowSport Safety Foundation in 2008. Personally hiring a lobbyist, he spends more than a decade pushing for California legislation to require ski resorts to publish their safety plans and accident statistics. He also lobbied in Colorado and Maine.

“Most of it came out of my pocket. But at that point I had lost my daughter and my wife,” Gregory said. Margaret Gregory died after a battle with ovarian cancer, two years after the incident with Jessica. “I was more than willing to spend it.”

His goal, he said, is not more regulation; it was more transparency.

It almost worked.

Unknown incidents

California ski resorts operate under a patchwork of oversight that leaves incidents on the slopes largely opaque.

California’s workplace safety agency, Cal/OSHA, regulates ski lifts through its Rides and Tram Unit and requires incident reports for any injuries requiring more than first aid.

Slopes are another matter.

Ski resorts operating with permits on National Forest System land are required to notify the U.S. Forest Service “as soon as possible” after fatal accidents, catastrophic injuries, search and rescue operations, ski lift problems and anything with the potential for serious damage, such as avalanches.

If it’s serious enough, the agency may conduct its own review.

But these accident reports are difficult to access and slow to obtain. And not all resorts operate on national forests—Northstar California Resort, for example, is largely on private land.

In court, resorts are further protected. Raven Whittingtonlead litigation partner at Porter Simon Sierra Injury Lawyers, said waivers and decades of court decisions have established that skiing and snowboarding comes with inherent risks.

But the case law, he says, hasn’t caught up with the changing conditions of the sport – something he notices when skiing with his young daughter. “People are flying over, going through slow zones, skiing out of control,” he said. “I’m skiing with 10 feet between my daughter and me, and we have people filming that distance.”

Ski safety expert Larry Haywoodwho has worked for the ski industry for decades and is now an expert in litigation, sees resorts differently.

“They’re conscientious and they don’t want people to get hurt,” Haywood said. “It’s not good for business. All this press just in the last week or so with these Heavenly and the deaths at Northstar — there are people who decide not to ski because of that, right?”

“Excessive Burden”

Gregory’s lobbying efforts paid off in 2010: California lawmakers passed a bill authored by then-Assemblyman Dave Jones requiring ski resorts to prepare publicly available safety plans and establish their own policies regarding signs and barriers for certain collision hazards.

It also called for the release of monthly reports upon request on skiing, snowboarding or sledding deaths – including the cause and location of the accident, the age of the person affected and where medical attention was provided.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who broke his femur in a skiing accident the same year Jessica Gregory died, vetoed it — saying the requirements duplicate those of the U.S. Forest Service and don’t necessarily increase safety.

At the time, he said the bill “could place an unnecessary burden on resorts.” Last winter, the ski and snowboard industry in California and Nevada added $1.8 billion to state GDP and $100 million to state and local tax revenue, according to Ski California.

The next year, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it almost equal measurecalling it “another exercise of the state’s regulatory powers for purposes that are normally managed by private business or the people themselves.”

another two-year effort to require ski resorts to regularly submit monthly accident reports for both serious injuries and fatalities to the California Department of Public Health died in the Legislative Assembly. It didn’t even make it to Brown’s desk.

Ski California says it opposes legislation to increase reporting. “This legislation attempted to impose untenable requirements on ski areas and found no support from the industry, local legislators or California governors,” said Jess Weaver, a spokesman for the industry group.

Weaver blamed California’s legislative effort on “one single person who had no knowledge of how ski areas work” and said the industry’s current position is unchanged.

Gov. Brown declined to comment through a spokesman, and a representative for Schwarzenegger did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry.

Joneswho later served as the state’s insurance commissioner, called the vetoes unfortunate.

“It’s disappointing that 16 years have passed and it continues to be the case that safety plans and reporting of deaths or injuries are not required,” Jones said. “I don’t think burying your head in the sand eliminates the risk or the problem.”

“Situational Awareness”

Gregory doesn’t know if his daughter, Jessica, would check Alpine Meadows’ safety statistics if they were public.

“She was a 24-year-old woman, a young woman at that point. I’m not sure she would have looked at it definitively,” Gregory said. “But I’m absolutely sure that parents who take their families skiing, especially first-time skiers, would do that.”

He and other transparency advocates don’t necessarily argue that with more information, individual skiers would change their behavior. They argue that information can shape industries and drive competition around safety.

“Making the information public would allow consumer protection organizations to see what’s going on and suggest appropriate changes, even if people themselves don’t change their behavior,” Jones said.

Ski California’s Weaver said numbers without context can easily be misinterpreted. So many factors are involved in accidents, from equipment to individual behavior.

“Ski areas operate in many different environments — with varying terrain, weather conditions, visitation levels and skier abilities — so raw totals don’t accurately reflect safety performance,” Weaver said. “Additionally, privacy and confidentiality laws prohibit us from disclosing details of any injuries reported or processed by ski patrol or other resort employees.”

The industry collects totals for the entire country. last winter 63 people are seriously injured such as broken necks or backs at ski resorts and 50 people died, according to the National Ski Areas Association report.

Analyzes of total state harm database by Gregory and later by Los Angeles Times two years agosuggests that industry statistics miss thousands of serious incidents requiring emergency room visits or hospitalization.

Scientists agree that lack of information is a problem. Without more detailed data, it is almost impossible to study how safety risks may change on crowded slopes or with climate warming.

“The data is probably the biggest basis for us to really be able to say anything about it,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an Earth systems scientist at Colorado State University.

An avid skier who grew up skiing around Tahoe — where he’s had his share of accidents — Hatchett said that kind of data won’t put him off one resort or another.

“You’ll be skiing in places that have the terrain, the snow, the ski culture and the experience you’re looking for,” Hatchett said. But knowing where and when more injuries occur would refine decision-making. “It can change my situational awareness.”

Twenty years after his daughter’s death, Gregory gave up law. His SnowSport Safety Foundation is no longer active.

But Gregory says he hasn’t given up on the fight for transparency.

“When I talk, people tell me they’re going skiing, I say, ‘You know that? You know what you’re getting yourself into?’

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.