I think that’s the worry, yes. People often stood up to avoid the waterfalls, avoid the water cannons… to avoid anything of that ilk, basically!
Neither did Congo's really. The most I ever got was spray or the odd random few drops. The force of the volume of water falling opposite each other meant the boats very rarely - if ever - got too close to one side or the other. Bit like the water tunnel in Poseidon's Fury at Universal - that sprays water round the circular walls & celling and the most you get is spray or the odd drop - like the waterfalls, you expect to get drenched but actually stay quite dry (11 mins in):
Isn't the reason they don't have belts is because although one never has capsized to my knowledge, these boats are smaller so more likely to capsize whereas the ones in America with belts are much bigger and almost if not impossible to capsize?
I believe that is correct! Seatbelts would hinder escape in the event of a capsize.
Yep that’s what I was trying to mean by harder to evacuate if they capsize. The higher sided boats are less likely too and if they do will have more space.
Unfortuantly people leave their common sense at home when visiting a theme park, which was why the incident at Drayton Manor occured. Common sense is you might fall in when stood up in a boat, people know this when on a river. Guest in a theme park logic is that the ride is perfectly safe and I won't come to any harm because its a theme park and nothing will go wrong.
There has been talk about these new speakers, and their very close positioning to each other in the audio topic, I didn’t want to derail that topic so thought it better to pop it in here instead.
Here is the Towers St video showing what I am referring to.
From: https://twitter.com/towersstreet/status/1632702039221256195?s=46&t=zG_i8R9vX93ZZU0RljfzWA
It feels like overkill to have this many speakers along the ride if they are for ride music only, I therefore suspect the primary reason for installing these is for H&S reasons - so that PA announcements can be played, and clearly heard by guests at all points along the ride to keep people from standing up.
Could this finally be as part of an attempt to reintroduce some of the lost features such as waterfalls and wave machines?
If you remember during the 2021/22 closed season the waterfalls were covered in substantial scaffolding, something was going on (otherwise why bother?), however come the 2022 season they were still switched off.
An interesting tidbit is that new HSE guidance for rapids rides was released in Dec 2021 (so literally during the exact time the park was working on the waterfalls), could that have derailed the plans to bring these back into use? At the least the legal people within Merlin would want time to work through this to see what, if anything had changed, causing a delay to any existing plans they had at the time.
Guidance here if anyone is interested:
Managing health and safety on river rapids rides
This guidance is aimed at controllers of river rapid rides and amusement park owners and will help them operate river rapid rides safely.www.hse.gov.uk
I know it’s potentially wishful thinking, but could these new speakers (along with perhaps other features that aren’t as visible to guests) be the risk mitigation measures that finally get the ride back to its former glory again?
I guess we will find out in a couple of weeks.
