SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The state’s workplace safety agency fined Blackbird Mountain Guides $151,300 for violations around the Feb. 17 avalanche near Tahoe that killed three of the company’s guides and six clients.

Cal-OSHA issued six citations to the company on Aug. 12, just ahead of the agency’s six-month deadline for completing an investigation after a workplace accident.

The most serious citations accuse Blackbird of failing to keep its employees safe by operating in dangerous conditions — the heightened avalanche risk caused by an intense and well-forecast blizzard that enveloped the Sierra during the three day and two night guided ski trip.

They include allegations the company failed to accurately assess the danger of the storm and mitigate risks, including the risk of combining two guided tour groups together to travel through the blizzard. The agency also fined Blackbird for failing to report an employee death within eight hours, and for failing to properly equip its employees with avalanche safety gear.

Use of the devices Cal-OSHA says the guides should have carried is a matter of debate among backcountry skiers, however. One of them, called an AvaLung, appears to have been discontinued from retail production.

Blackbird is appealing the penalties, a spokesperson for the company said.

“The citations do not reflect the reality of our profession or the safety program we have built,” the company said in a statement. “We believe Blackbird operated in full compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements and consistent with the established safety frameworks of the broader professional mountain guiding industry.”

In its own set of findings about the avalanche, published last week, Blackbird did not identify any internal failings as responsible for the deaths, instead documenting how its guides sought to avoid avalanche paths on their way out of the backcountry.

“Trained mountain guides commonly operate during periods of High avalanche danger and active storms by applying established risk-management practices,” the company wrote.

A former Blackbird guide who spoke to Cal-OSHA investigators also disagreed with the agency’s findings, he told The Sacramento Bee. Agency officials he spoke with lacked any expertise in avalanche safety, he said, and seemed more interested in punishing Blackbird than learning what had gone wrong in a highly unique work environment.

The guide spoke to the Bee on the condition of anonymity because a law enforcement investigation remains ongoing.

A criminal investigation opened by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office currently sits with that county’s district attorney, who has not yet announced a charging decision. The district attorney could not be immediately reached for comment Thursday night.

Cal-OSHA’s criminal unit, the Bureau of Investigations, is also continuing a separate investigation, according to the agency.

No new info from trip in OSHA citations

The Cal-OSHA citations issued this month offer limited details about the events of Feb. 17, much of which was previously made public by law enforcement officials, survivors and two reports, the one issued by the company and another from the Sierra Avalanche Center.

The most severe citation said Blackbird “failed to ensure that exposed employees were removed from the area of the hazard, in, near, or below avalanche terrain, or failed to ensure employees did not make decisions contrary to forecast recommendation.” In other words, that the guides should not have been working in avalanche terrain amid the rising danger.

That citation carried a proposed penalty of $81,000 and was labeled “willful-serious.”

On the day the ski group departed from Frog Lake Huts, a well-appointed set of backcountry lodgings they had spent two nights in, the Sierra Avalanche Center had issued an avalanche warning that read: “Avalanches from above could travel down through treed terrain, often thought of as ‘safe’ during storms. Travel in, near, or below avalanche terrain is not recommended.”

Last week, Blackbird published a report composed by a mountaineering and snow safety expert the company brought in to investigate the incident. That consultant, Don Sharaf, found that the group sought to exit the backcountry along a route the company had designated for use in high avalanche danger. On the journey out, however, the group ended up off-route and too close under Perry’s Peak, where the avalanche released.

The avalanche is among the deadliest in U.S. history, and backcountry skiing experts interviewed by the Bee have expressed puzzlement over exactly how the trained group of guides ended up in its path.

Sharaf’s report, and Blackbird’s addendum to it, suggests the guides leading the group did not realize they had strayed too close under Perry’s Peak.

Mountain guides often work in such conditions, Blackbird maintained.

Avalanche danger ratings “are regional forecasts intended to inform terrain selection and decision-making; they are not a prohibition on travel,” the company wrote. “Guides use these forecasts in conjunction with real-time field observations to adjust routes, objectives, and travel techniques as conditions evolve. Guiding under elevated avalanche hazard is a recognized and accepted professional practice when these methods are applied.”

In other words, the company maintains the decision to travel that day was not a violation of guiding procedure, but that the group just steered slightly wrong and got caught.

All but two people in the group of 15 — one client and one guide who had momentarily fallen behind the group because of an equipment issue — were buried by the wall of snow that came off the mountain. Those two freed a third person, who was only partially buried, and those three were able to dig out three other surviving skiers.

Dispute over rescue

In two of the citations, Cal-OSHA accused the company of endangering an employee by allowing one of them to go into the backcountry during the rescue operation against a recommendation of local law enforcement. Blackbird’s founder, Zeb Blais, and another employee were among the first group of rescuers to arrive at the avalanche scene after skiing in from Interstate 80.

Blais and his colleague started breaking trail through the snow toward the avalanche site, and were eventually joined by four Search and Rescue volunteers from two agencies, the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office and Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue, who caught up to them, according to the Blackbird report. The Blackbird guides brought puffy jackets and stoves in case they had to care for the surviving skiers overnight.

When they arrived, the six skiers began digging people out of the snow, though no one else was recovered alive. According to the Nevada County Coroner’s Office, all nine people who died asphyxiated.

The Blackbird duo started in toward the avalanche scene after it appeared to them uncertain when rescuers from the different agencies would start off, the former guide who spoke with the Bee said. They were never ordered not to enter the backcountry, he said, though officials told them they would be “on their own,” if they did so.

Over the course of that night and the next day, Blackbird guides worked with the Search and Rescue crews, he said, providing information about avalanche hazards and safe travel routes and landing zones in the area. The guide questioned whether OSHA’s fine would make trained guides less likely to respond to backcountry emergencies when time can be of the essence, he said.

“If they are going to fine Blackbird for going out and working that scene then the expectation in the future is don’t go out there or you’re going to collect a bunch of fines,” he said.

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