Ten people were injured and evacuated when a gondola support tower snapped in half but luckily none of the injuries seem to be life threatening. From what I’ve heard the rescue took hours and hours and on one of the coldest days of the year so far to boot. The accident happened on the Excalibur Gondola, which carries skiers to the top of Blackcomb Mountain from Whistler Village. It is believed the tower snapped due to a rare ice build-up.

“Several factors converged to cause the tower failure. The structure of the tower is such that two parts are spliced together. Water had seeped into the tower which had turned to ice with the recent extreme cold temperatures. The ice build-up caused the tower splice to rupture, an extremely unusual situation referred to as ice-jacking,” said a statement from Whistler officials.

This is definitely news that people at Whistler didn’t need for their opening week of the new state of the art, Peak-2-Peak gondola. The new gondola reaches heights above 1400 feet and for anyone with fear of heights might be strongly reconsidering that trip to Whistler after this event. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fall from those heights.

It’s great that no one was seriously injured in such an unfortunate event, lets hope this was a very isolated incident. With the 2010 Olympic Games heading their way, lets hope we don’t see anymore stories like this in the headlines.