Paralyzed Skier Awarded $14 Million

This is messed up:

A King County jury has awarded $14 million in damages to a 26-year-old man who was left paralyzed after a jump at Snoqualmie Pass.

The jury found that Summit at Snoqualmie operator Ski Lifts, Inc. failed to take safety into consideration at its Summit West terrain park. Because of that failure, the company was partially responsible for the crash that nearly killed Kenny Salvini in February 2004, the jury ruled.

Tacoma lawyer Jack Connelly said his client was left a quadriplegic after skiing off a badly designed "tabletop" jump at the terrain park. Connelly said 15 other skiers and snowboarders had been hurt on the jump earlier that season, but the jump was left open.

"They didn't even consider closing down the jump and closing down the landings," he said. "Nobody was paying attention. Nobody was doing anything."

Reading from a statement, spokesman Guy Lawrence said Friday that the company was "disappointed but respectful" of the jury verdict.

"At the Summit at Snoqualmie, the safety of our guests and our employees has always, and will continue to be our primary concern," he said. But, Lawrence added, participation "suggest that a skier or rider accepts the risks of that activity."

With every accident there is a lawyer and a lawsuit it seems. Remember back in 1998 (or around there) a guy built a jump at Alpental to jump the road and didn't make it and ended up paralyzed. He then brought a lawsuit against Booth Creek for making the ski area accessable for him after the area was closed so he was able to attempt the jump. Booth won that one, but it still cost them $$$ to defend themselves against a fool.

I'm sorry the kid got hurt, but if your going to try crazy stunts you better know what your doing and take responsibility for your actions.

This is unfortunate for the ski area. Doesn't the purschaser's lift ticket exclude the ski area from liability in this case ??? Look before you jump, use common sense, don't try anything you can't handle and accept the consequences.

Gotta wonder if the new, nearly month early, Alpental closing date has anything to do with this. Bummer, I was looking forward to Cinqo de Mayo skiing.

On the one hand, I'm all for personal responsibility on the mountain. On the other, it amazes me that terrain parks have existed as long as they have without a case like this.

There have been cases like this. I know of one at Mammoth, one at Jackson, one at Whistler, one in CO somewhere. The difference is that this time, the plaintiff won. The part that really gets me is that the plaintiff's case was based on a negligently designed/constructed/maintained jump - but I used that jump within a week of this kid's accident, and I know for certain that there wasn't anything wrong with it. The kid went too fast and was out of balance, end of story. Too bad the jury was comprised of 12 people who don't ski and don't know about skiing.

Here's a longer report on it:

seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews...skijumpaward07m.html

"Going off this jump was the equivalent of jumping off a three-story building," Connelly said. "If you're going to be throwing kids 37 feet in the air, these jumps need to be engineered, designed and constructed properly."
...
"According to Connelly, other people were injured on the same jump in the weeks before Salvini's accident, including a snowboarder who broke his back. A week after Salvini was injured, 19-year-old Peter Melrose of Bellevue died going off a different jump at the same terrain park, he said.

"There were 10 accidents with eight people taken off the slope in a toboggan in the weeks before Salvini was hurt, landing on what Connelly said was a flat surface. In all, he said, evidence of 15 earlier accidents was admitted into evidence but 'nothing was done' by ski operators to fix or close the faulty jumps."

It sounds like something was not right in this TP. Ski area 'engineers' do need to take into account the naivete of their patrons, who are for the most part unskilled and ignorant--if you build a suicide jump, they WILL go off of it. The failure to consider this simple fact is reckless and stupid on the part of the ski area.

But you can style the potentially fatal jumps, so they must be okay...? Well, some people can shoot up massive amounts of heroin without killing themselves, but there are good reasons why it's still a controlled substance, and not legally peddled to the general public. You can always go throw big hucks out of bounds if you really need your fix.

I'm not necessarily saying that there shouldn't be huge jumps in a ski area, but if there are, they ought to have proper landings, and perhaps some official mechanism to keep newbs off of them.

In my opinion, most businesses will not change their ways except under the threat of revenue loss. So here's another 14 million reasons why the ski area might want to think a little harder about what's happening on the slopes.