One person was killed and 12 people were rescued after being trapped for about six hours at the bottom of a former Colorado gold mine when an elevator malfunctioned at the tourist site, authorities said.
The elevator was descending into the Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine near the town of Cripple Creek when it had a mechanical problem around 500 feet (152 meters) beneath the surface, creating a “severe danger for the participants,” Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell said.
The 12 adults who were trapped about 1,000 feet (305 meters) below ground had access to water and used radios to communicate with authorities, who told them there was an elevator issue, Mikesell said.
Mines that operate as tourist attractions in Colorado must designate someone to inspect the mines and the transportation systems daily, according to the state Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety. Mikesell said he didn’t know the date of the last inspection. Records of the inspections weren’t immediately available online.
I feel like if someone is supposed to be inspecting things daily that there should be an easily accessible record of those inspections.
There’s a AvE video about a gondola where the inspector/maintenance engineer left the maintenance clamps on one of the emergency brakes that kept tugging on a cable. (This thing keeps the brakes open).
When something else failed, the emergency brakes never closed on the cable and it ended up just being a box of arms and legs at the bottom of the hill.
My point is it’s never one guys fault, a lot of things failed for it come to this one guy being allowed to leave the maintenance equipment on for months
I used to love AvEs videos before he got on the antivax conspiracy theorist train. Is he still doing that?
Haven’t seen a video like that. I don’t watch a lot because I’m not interested in all the tooling and stuff. Sad to hear such a sensible guy spewing that shit.
Ah, yeah, I used to watch him for the tool videos and then when covid happened he got super into antivax conspiracy stuff and was a proud vocal supporter of the convoy antivax protest. That’s when I finally unsubbed.
He did a three minute video praising the Truckers Protest a while back and I stopped watching that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doubled down, but that “protest” was always a scam and I lost a lot of respect for him for not identifying it as such.
Yeah but who knows what qualifies as an inspection. It might have just been an employee walking the route every morning before letting customers. Checking air quality is probably the most important thing to do frequently.
The selectively sparse details make me wonder what happened. From what I can infer, the elevator’s travel is 1000 feet. It malfunctioned at 500 feet. Presumably it didn’t crash 500 feet or there would be far more people dead and many serious injuries. Most elevators have numerous mechanisms to prevent sudden drops even if the cable snaps. An elevator is SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to cause injury by flying UP then crashing down.
I’m wondering if an already unstable someone with claustrophobia didn’t go absolutely bonkers, start hurting people, and was murdered. Six hours in a small room with water is hardly a life-threatening crisis. Some people work daily in worse conditions.
Who knows, but I’m assuming something went down in that elevator considering how the details of the injuries and death are specifically omitted.
Second theory: someone died from a heart attack or something similar, and sitting in a box 1000 feet underground with a dead body eventually caused someone to snap, and then they freaked out and hurt others before they were injured in the process of being restrained.
Edit: found more info. Looks like there were five people in the elevator. The person that died was the tour guide, who hit the emergency stop. It’s possible he was trying to do something about it, because the door was broken when it was inspected. I’m thinking he was trying to fix the door or something and then the elevator dropped and smashed whatever parts of him that were outside the door. The other four in the elevator were all minorly injured, largely neck and back pain. So maybe it did do a semi-controlled drop.
The other uninjured people weren’t in the elevator they were in the tour area below and had already come down earlier. They were the ones trapped for six hours. Plenty of space. They had water and they lowered pizza down for them.
The ones in the elevator were rescued within 20min.
Guarantee that the phrase “the mine claims people even today” will become part of the tour’s safety speech from here on.
Also: How did the 1 person die? The article just kinda leaves that part out. Actually kinda wonder if it was a minor, considering they withheld their name.
