A 68-year-old woman riding a zip line at Kualoa Ranch on Thursday was seriously injured when she crashed into a male rider who was stuck on the line.
The woman, the mother-in-law of a ranch employee, was one of six people testing a new course that is not yet open to the public, Kualoa Ranch spokeswoman Olena Heu said.
Emergency Medical Services got the call at 2:45 p.m. that two riders collided, and an ambulance was dispatched to the site on the Kaaawa side of the ranch.
The woman was in serious but stable condition when she was taken to a hospital with a hip injury, Emergency Services Department spokeswoman Shayne Enright said.
Heu said the 2:30 p.m. accident occurred on the fourth stop of a seven-stop course that takes 21⁄2 hours to complete.
The ranch had encouraged employees to invite their families to test out the course, and the ranch was performing training runs with workers and their families when the collision occurred, she said.
Another guest was on the same section of line but was stuck because he had not been traveling fast enough to make it to the end, Heu said.
An employee was going out on the line to pull him in. Meanwhile, batteries in a radio were dead, so workers communicated with hand signals instead.
They miscommunicated and "inadvertently sent the mother-in-law down while the male was still on the line," Heu said.
The woman complained of hip pain, so as a precautionary measure, EMS was called.
The fourth section, where the accident occurred, is 1,290 feet long. It is 100 feet off the ground at the highest point but was 35 feet high in the area of the crash, Heu said.
The company hired to build the course and to perform training is Synergo, which specializes in ropes courses and zip lines, Heu said.
Hawaii does not have any laws regulating zip line companies, though there have been proposals to enact some.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the owners and site operators of Piiholo Ranch Zipline on Maui for the May 6 death of a 29-year-old employee who had fallen 150 feet into a ravine and died.
OSHA’s investigation found proper safety measures could have prevented Patricia Rabellizsa’s death. The operator’s policy made it optional for employees to wear restraining lanyards connected to their harnesses.
OSHA said the accident happened when Rabellizsa and another worker tried to bring in a customer and the momentum pulled both workers off the platform above a ravine.
In 2011 a Hawaii island zip line tower collapsed because of weak soil, killing worker Ted Callaway, 36, of Lahaina. Another worker was critically injured.
