It began with a simple, careless mistake, as many serious accidents do. I was getting our snowcat ready for the winter at Eaton Mountain, working by myself. It was early December 2011, and we were just a few weeks away from opening for the season.

Ours is a true mom and pop area. My wife and I purchased it at the end of 2008. Both of us work regular jobs outside the ski industry to pay the bills, but buying a project ski area had been a very long-term goal for us.

Eaton had been in operation at the time of our purchase, but was in a state of severe disrepair. We did not operate for the first two years in order make critical repairs and to make the place more presentable. We do most of the work ourselves; we have no regular summer crew.

In the winter of 2010-11, we had reopened the tubing park to a strong and positive response. We are still working to get the ski operations up and running. And on that day in early December, I was working on one of our snowcats.

The woman who was going to be the lodge manager for the season hadn’t started work yet, but she had stopped in to talk to my wife. They were in the lodge, about 100 yards away. Her boyfriend, Jason, had come with her and had wandered over to see what I was doing.

I had been having some trouble with the drive on the driver’s side and had just replaced the hydraulic fluid in the cat, a relatively rare forward cab LMC 3700 CF. I had the driver’s side track opened and peeled back from the drive sprocket. The track was still sitting on the machine like it normally would be, just off the sprocket. The teeth on the bottom of the sprocket were well clear of the track lying on the ground, by about six inches (see photo on right).

After changing hydraulic fluid, you need to circulate it through the system. This is accomplished by running the machine and gradually making the hydraulic functions (the drives in this case) run in each direction. At the time, I was most concerned with the driver’s side hydraulic pump and drive system.

The 3700 doesn’t use a steering wheel; instead, it has two joy sticks, one for controlling each track. Basically, I was pushing the stick for the driver’s side forward and backward to circulate the fluid, and the sprocket was turning great.


RECIPE FOR DISASTER
After climbing in and out of the cab to do this two or three times, I got lazy and decided to just stand outside the machine, reach in, and run the controls. Why not? I’m tall and have long arms.

I was standing in front of the track, with my left leg in line with the wheels and toes nearly in contact with the track, as in the photo. What is wrong with this (restaged) picture? (Hint: it’s not the broken door, a result of what happens next.)

In the 3700, the knobs for the left and right joysticks are less than an inch apart. I was moving the driver’s side joystick forward and back when, as I was pulling the joystick forward, the back of my hand hit the knob for the passenger-side track—which was closed up and fully tensioned.

With that, the machine immediately crept forward, very slowly…click, click, click. It immediately pinned both of my feet, and before I could even push the handle back, the cat knocked me down, and I was stuck.

Jason saw what was happening and tried to help, but was unable to stop the cat. Because of the way the track was bunched up, it slammed the door shut and blocked him from opening it.

The machine ran completely over me, slowly dropping the track on me as it went. The track wasn’t closed or on the sprocket, so it wasn’t churning, but the cat pressed the track into me as it went over. The whole thing probably lasted about 20 seconds.

Once it got my legs, I was stuck pretty much straight in line with the track, and knew it was going to go over my head. In that situation your mind goes to a different place, shock, or whatever.

I was conscious for nearly the entire episode. I basically thought that was going to be it for me. I could feel bones breaking, probably either my face or my shoulder as it went over; but I felt distanced from the immediate pain. I could see under the track to the building where my wife and 8-year-old boy were. All I thought of was, “What will they do and what will their lives be like without me?” That pretty much consumed my mind.

Well, that and “I’ve really screwed up now, there’s no way I can get out of this.”

What sticks out in my mind is Jason screaming like crazy, “Dave, Dave, oh my god, Dave!” thinking he was watching me die a terrible death. After the cat ran over my leg, I couldn’t feel it anymore. But based on what he was saying, I was thinking I must have bones sticking out and blood shooting out all over the place.

As the machine approached my face, I told Jason what I thought were my last words: “make sure my wife and kid know I love them more than anything.” Then the machine dropped the last of the folded track on my face and crawled over my head, and I blacked out for a few seconds.

Next thing I know, I’m alive.

Once the machine cleared me, Jason pulled the keys out to stop it, and single-handedly moved more than six feet of track off of me. If you’ve ever worked with steel-cleated groomer tracks you know that it would normally take about four guys or a piece of heavy equipment to do that. It was a feat of superhuman strength.

I was hugely lucky that he was there. Otherwise, it could have been quite a while before my wife, 300 feet away in the lodge building, would have figured out what had happened.

Now, I’m an EMT, and after Jason got the track off me I was able to get myself rolled over to my side. My mouth was full of blood; I spit that out and told Jason’s girlfriend, who had now come over, to get blankets and make sure I didn’t move. Jason and his girlfriend were able to immediately call for help.

First the police arrived, then the ambulance, fire department, and then the Life Flight helicopter. I was able to communicate with the emergency personnel on the scene. They knocked me out prior to boarding the helicopter; I was in an induced coma for three days.

When I woke up, I had been through several surgeries and learned that my left side had been beaten up pretty bad, from foot to knee and then above the shoulder, including my head. My left side had been right in line with the wheels. My left foot, the initial point of contact, had been pulled down into a straight line with my leg, severely dislocating my ankle. Four pins had been put into my leg, and the skin was torn down to the bone all along my foot and shin. My jaw was broken in three spots, bones around my eye and cheek were broken, my cheek was torn all the way through in multiple places, and I had a few fractures in my skull. I also broke my wrist and shoulder blade.

My right side, under the outer edge of the track (and therefore under less weight), fared considerably better.

I was also lucky that, between my knee and my shoulder, I had only a few cuts and bruises. I think that I escaped major body core injuries because the ground was just soft enough, and in just the right place. It had been warm for a few days, so the ground was muddy. Also remarkable, I did not have a single infection, even though I had multiple deep lacerations contaminated with mud, rust, and everything else. Furthermore, I did not require any blood transfusions. I believe my luck was due in large part to the cold temperatures at the time of the accident. A perfect balance of weather conditions was one of several major contributors in saving my life.


THE AFTERMATH
Having a major accident and being injured is one thing, but the healing and recovery process is where the real challenge lies. Besides the obvious physical pain there is a challenging mental game.

I was stuck on my back in a hospital bed for three weeks wondering what my new normal was going to be like. I was breathing through the tracheotomy in my neck, had a nasal feeding tube and catheters. My eyes were so swollen I could not completely close them. Having to depend on hospital staff for even the most basic function, like getting dressed, getting a drink, and going to the bathroom is a humbling experience. Although it only lasted a few weeks, it seemed like a miserable eternity.

Being laid up and having my jaw wired shut for two months, I lost 25 pounds and most of my physical strength. I did find out, though, that it is possible to blend up a pizza or a Whopper and eat it through a straw. The otherwise crackerjack hospital staff told me you couldn’t, but I proved them wrong.

I went through many of the same post-traumatic issues you hear about from soldiers and others in similar situations—but fortunately in my case I did completely recover. It took me two or three weeks to get my head around the fact I was still alive. I just felt that I didn’t belong here (still living).

While at the hospital, Jason and I spent a lot of time talking through what exactly happened. Once I figured out how the whole accident went down, things started making sense and I entered a better frame of mind. Talking through the accident also helped Jason come to grips with the stress he had endured; in some ways I think it is probably harder to helplessly witness an accident than to be the primary victim. But I had my issues to deal with, too. It was about two weeks before I was able to look at X-rays of my skull, and I became uncomfortable when it came time to leave the hospital and return to our place at the ski area and the scene of the accident.

I measure the costs of this accident in several other ways. The medical bills were over $150,000; the helicopter ride alone was more than $8,000. The stress on my family was significant. More broadly, because of this accident, we didn’t operate the ski area for the season, so our staff were out of work. We lost momentum after having had a good opening season (although, in hindsight, given the weather, it wasn’t a bad move to not operate).

The support I got from my wife, from my friends up at the ski area, from other ski areas and other industry people was just great. After an accident like this, you find out who your friends are, and I found I have more of them than I knew.

Now, less than a year later, I’m up and around. I was at the LMS show last April, less than five months after the accident. I’m permanently deaf in one ear, and my foot is numb and achy, but other than that, I’m pretty much back to 100 percent.


LESSONS OF THE FALL
There are very two simple but important takeaways from my case from a safety standpoint:

Do not work alone.

Take a minute to think about what you’re doing.

If I have any advice it would just be this: stop and think about what you are doing. There are lots of ways to get hurt at a ski area. When you’re cold, tired, been working all day, maybe hungry, in a rush because you feel you have to get the job done, everybody’s waiting—a situation we are all familiar with—that sets the stage for bad things to happen.

Before you tackle a problem, just sit back for a minute, take a deep breath and study what you’ve got, think about what you are doing. Don’t just jump immediately from one thing to the next. It’s easy to say, hard to do. But safety’s everything: being injured, laid up, or worse is no good for you or anybody else.

This incident also highlights a couple of important points worth sharing about press relations and OSHA.

Before the helicopter even landed to pick me up, reporters were already on the scene. As you can imagine, it was a chaotic and emotionally charged atmosphere: neighbors milling around, you’ve got the fire department and the ambulance crews, the police, my family, Jason and his girlfriend, and a helicopter. No one really had all the facts, so nearly every news story about the incident contained some inaccuracies, including one that said I had been run over by an employee. The reporter of the story had quoted a neighbor, who had talked to my wife, neither of whom had witnessed what happened.

I don’t think we could have handled this particular case any differently, but it does emphasize why it is important to have policies regarding how your business handles interactions with the media. It’s very easy for inaccurate information to spread.

There’s another reason for managing communications for concise and accurate information. On day two, while I was still unconscious in the ICU, an official from OSHA showed up to interview me about the accident.

My wife politely explained that I was unavailable. Then she called our attorney and asked, “How should we handle this?” He said, to paraphrase, “When OSHA sees press reports of employees involved in workplace injuries (as in the news story stating that an employee had driven over me with the snowcat), it is their job to act on it and investigate. You don’t have any employees at present, so you don’t really fall under the purview of OSHA and workers’ comp. However, you’re now on their radar, so it is very likely they will be back as soon as you reopen.”

Great! Now, we’re not trying to hide anything at Eaton Mountain, and I have no beef with the inspectors doing their job, but now I have to anticipate that OSHA will be looking at everything with a microscope. I don’t care how polished your business operation is, if they look hard enough, they will find something.

So that’s my story. I share this not to become some kind of survival hero, but so that it might serve as a hard-learned lesson on safety and common sense. I have told it at LMS and at the Northeast Summit shows, and am more than happy to share it with anyone else.

I always expect people to react by saying, “well yeah, if you stand in front of a machine like that, what do you expect?” But when speaking on this topic, I’ve been surprised by the number of wide eyes and open mouths, some clearly muttering “holy crap,” or something similar. I’ve had more than one person come up to me afterward saying they’ve done the exact same thing (reaching into the cab of a running machine to work the controls) without thinking anything of it. Knowing that this story has hit home with more than one person is the best thing that can come of it.

Happy winter and stay safe!