I walk past tower 4 of the Excalibur Gondola every day on the way to the office. Was definitely an unfortunate incident - nothing more, nothing less.
Leave it to the media to sensationalize anything of this nature. Granted, it was a serious incident, but 12 people walked away with minor injuries - the guy with the "head all bashed up" actually had a minor cut above his eye after falling inside the gondola. Many news reports on the radio and TV had fun putting stress upon the word "suffered" when it was reported that 12 people 'suffered' minor injuries.
I liken this media frenzy to the kind that you see when two planes come within a half mile of each other. Makes international headlines - when f-all happened.
Sure I'm angry about the way the media chose to report this, and the bad choice that Whistler Mountain made back in 1994 to buy a chairlift with a widespread design failure from a flegling lift company (YAN -aka- You're Airborne Now) which resulted in an accident and subsequent reports of which many people seem unwilling to put to rest. And yes, it was replaced the year immediately following the accident.
The media loves to use a variety of buzzwords (i.e. snap, collapse, disaster, suffer, rushed to hospital, etc.) whenever there are opportunities to sell more negative media offerings.
To put things into perspective, a single gondola tower did not "snap" in half. Two parts of the tower separated by the force of the ice buildup due to the expansion of water seepage. The weld below the flange failed. See the photo below which helps illustrate this.
The wise people will understand that since this happened on Tuesday, every single lift has undergone serious inspection and testing, making Whistler one of the safest resorts in the world to ski at this time.
The silver lining in all of this is that it will make the lift operators feel more important when standing in the cold!