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Ride/Park Accidents

jmc said:
Had a look at some other videos of the ride operating, and it definitely doesn’t take that corner at such speed under normal operation.



I wonder what would cause that to happen? Too little water in the trough perhaps? None the less that is no way for a log flume to be taking a corner and its no wonder there was an incident.


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It's striking when you watch it isn't it? I know log flumes are certainly not known for taking corners gracefully and rely on smashing into the trough to be able to negotiation a corner, but this seems far too fast and high.

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Video of the evac.



If anything I'd say this looks like the water level was too high. The boat hits the railings when it should hit the trough below, the railing letting the water through not providing the buffer of the actual water that the trough would. Then the tipping later on the boat has ridden over the railings when it shouldn't be anything like that high.
 
I know it’s very dangerous, but it almost looks like the ride is doing a little dance or something…
 
Brand new ride too. Oh dear. Hopefully Zamperla will put something out so other operators will be able to avoid a similar issue.
 
Looks like there was a collision on Shivering Timbers at Michigan's Adventure over the weekend.

gmFk87b.jpeg


The first hand report is below.

The claimed 30mph seems unlikely although from the pictures it looks like a reasonable impact. Reports on Facebook suggest the blue train had been sitting on the brakes for about 10 minutes and that maintenance personnel released it with the green train still standing in the station.

 
Ooh dear, that looks quite bad. The front car almost looks to have derailed a little!

I hope everyone’s OK.
 
30 mph :laughing::laughing: People are so dumb.

The track does dip into the station so it'd have a bit of speed, but nothing like that.
 
Seriously, maintenance need to stop shifting trains in manual when they're loaded.
 
There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that but there should be a formal process to ensure it's done safely, and people need to follow it every time.

I don't know how the brakes were released manually but if from the operator's panel you think you'd notice the train sitting in front of you.
 
@Alsty is that common practice in parks you have worked in? It's always been hugely frowned upon in my experience, to the point where it has been actively discouraged in almost all circumstances.
 
Rick said:
Seriously, maintenance need to stop shifting trains in manual when they're loaded.
Click to expand...
Errr not so sure about that.

Maintenance teams will move loaded vehicles in manual all the time across every park worldwide. Merlin parks still do it. Alton Towers still does it. There is nothing inherently dangerous with it. Admittedly they need to take care, but still.

Most responsible park operators have procedures in place to ensure this. Merlin failed to do that with The Smiler, as has this park in this case. That doesn’t mean to say manual = danger
 
Most ride manuals I've seen state that maintenance/manual mode must not be used with guests on the ride - guests should always be evacuated first.

Whether or not parks actually stick to that is another matter - most of the time it'll be far easier to stick in into maintenance, reset whatever the fault was and put it back into auto to get the guests off at the station.
 
My experience was about 20 years ago to be fair, but it was fairly common for maintenance to use manual mode to reset fault codes and/or get the trains back to a place where they could be evacuated. I'm pretty sure that's what still happens now otherwise we'd see lots more evacuations.

I guess it comes down to risk assessment. You could argue it's safer (when done properly) to use manual mode and get a train to a better location than to evacuate a train on a high lift hill/ brake run etc where the risk of falling from height is not insignificant.
 
Worth reflecting that there is manual and there is manual. On a lot of newer rides, it's less straightforward to move trains by directly controlling brakes and kickers, you often operate at 'block level' rather than manually controlling individual items.

On older rides without PLCs or with more primitive PLCs/relays, you have to be more creative as it is more of a manual process overall. When I working an Arrow looper we had a procession of maintenance guys fail to restart the ride, with one train on the lift and another in the safeties, the head mechanic switched off the PLC, messed around with a compressor to get the train moving out of the brakes and manually switched on the lift motor to get the train off the lift.
 
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