"Jay Marshall, hunkered down in a cold wind while on a lift next to the broken one, said that his lift was moving but that the broken one was not."
Um, if he's on a lift next to a broken one, do you have to tell us that the broken one wasn't working? For that matter, do you have to tell us that one that's not the broken one was working?
And isn't "hunkered down in a cold wind while on a lift next to" a little inelegant? Letting go of "hunkered down in" might have helped:
" ... enduring the cold wind as he rode a lift next to the broken one."
Then again, maybe not. It might be best to just cut the whole sentence. After all, who cares if a guy on a moving chair lift noticed that a broken chair lift wasn't moving?
But then you get to the next sentence and see you've been led down the wrong path.
"Jay Marshall, hunkered down in a cold wind while on a lift next to the broken one, said that his lift was moving but that the broken one was not. There was a 'loud snapping noise' after the lift restarted, he said, then screams."
Aha. So the we see that Marshall was talking about something that happened earlier. But the verb "was," written in the same tense as "hunkered," made it sound as though Marshall's lift was motionless as he was hunkered down and talking to the reporter. Shifting from simple past tense ("was") to past perfect (i.e. "had been") would have saved us the confusion: Hunkered down in a cold wind, Marshall said that the lift next to his had stopped working (at some point prior).
Skimming the rest of the article, I see it's quite well written. (Even good writers let a clunker slip in now and then. That's why they have editors.) But its lone bad sentence just reached out and grabbed me. I hope this isn't the start of a trend. I'd hate to think what would happen if bad sentences starting banding together and coming after editors.
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