WHISTLER, B.C. -- What was to be a day of fun and skiing turned into a terrifying ordeal for those jolted and then left stranded when a gondola tower partially collapsed.
No one was seriously hurt in the accident that happened at about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Doug Forseth, senior vice president for Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort, said that "structural failure" on a tower on Blackcomb Mountain's Excalibur gondola was the cause of the accident.
While a crane was brought in to support the leaning tower, fire crews worked quickly to evacuate three cars that were the most in danger.
One of the gondola cars hit a bus shelter, while two more were left dangling before the broken tower.
It took more than three hours for fire crews and the mountain's ski patrol to evacuate 53 stranded passengers on the lift's wire cable, Forseth said.
RCMP Sgt. Steve Wright said the passengers who were rescued were in good spirits and were met by emergency health services.
He said frigid temperatures were not a concern because the people were wearing protective ski clothing and were in a sheltered environment.
The resort will play host to the alpine events at the 2010 Winter Games. All of the Games events will take place on Whistler mountain, not Blackcomb where the accident occurred.
Forseth said an investigation into the cause of the accident will begin Wednesday.
"We have representatives of Dopelmayr, the lift manufacturer, coming tomorrow. We will start to look at this failure in daylight and start to look at the possibilities of what might have caused this."
One resort employee, who didn't want to give her name, said she saw one gondola car swinging wildly from side to side after the tower went down and another flip upside down. She said it didn't appear there were any passengers in the car that flipped.
Wright said the accident took place near Fitzsimmons Creek, between Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains.
A crowd gathered at the base of the mountain as word spread of the accident.
Many feared the collapse had occurred on the new Peak-to-Peak lift, connecting the peak of Whistler mountain to the peak of Blackcomb mountain. It's the highest in the world at 436 metres above the ground.
Victoria mom Moira Pittam feared the worst when she heard of the accident. Her daughter, 20-year-old Aja, was skiing at the Whistler resort on Tuesday.
"I called her and she returned my call immediately, thank God," she said. "She's fine, yes. I was concerned obviously, because she was up there."
She hadn't even heard about the collapse, said Pittam.
Amber Turnau, a spokeswoman for Whistler Blackcomb, said the tower that collapsed is on the lower half of the lift.
She said Tower 4, the one that went down, is only a couple of blocks from the gondola's start.
"The upper section of the gondola is independent of the lower section and was cleared of guests and shut down," she said.
It's not the first ski lift accident at the resort.
A Dec. 23, 1995, accident on the Quicksilver ski lift killed two men and injured nine other people.
The high-speed lift was ferrying skiers to the top of a run when one chair slipped on a cable and slammed into another, setting off a cascade that sent four chairs crashing into the bush and rocks three storeys below.
A coroner's report said the accident was a result of systemic failure, noting problems with the lift system's grip mechanisms should have been detected in advance.
Whistler city councillor Gordon McKeever said when he heard of Tuesday's incident, his mind immediately went to the fatal accident more than a decade ago.
"When I first learned, it just made my stomach go sick because I was here for that horrible, horrible accident many years ago," McKeever said.
In January 2006, two empty gondola cars at the Sunshine Village ski resort near Banff, Alta., plummeted to the ground after being dislodged from their cables by high winds. No one was injured.
