At 12:13 p.m. on Dec. 21 last year — a Saturday during peak holiday season — a part called an evener beam failed on a gondola tower near the loading zone at Winter Park. Lift operators reported hearing a loud bang as the beam bent and cracked, then a squeal as the gondola ground to a halt.

There were 182 passengers packed into more than a dozen 10-passenger gondola cars, dangling from the mile-long haul rope extending from the base to the top of the mountain at Sunspot. Sami O’Neill, who was one month into her new role as a supervisor after serving for years as a Winter Park patroller, was struck by how calm her colleagues appeared that day as they swung into action.

“It was like, we do this all the time, we’re comfortable with this gear. We weren’t expecting the gondola to break, but it

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