A roller coaster at a Jersey Shore amusement park was undergoing a safety check not long ago when its two water-filled crash dummies fell off the ride and onto the roof of the hotel next door. The VP of the amusement park says the coaster is still 100% safe.
The GaleForce roller coaster, part of Playland’s Castaway Cove, in Ocean City, NJ, goes through about 2 hours of testing every day, with about 13 to 15 test rides every morning, but on this fateful day, the two test dummies they used both fell off. (From Joe: I’ll spare the story of how I projectile vomited off of a spinning ride in Ocean City when I was a teenager).
As per Brian Hartley, VP of Playland’s Castaway Cove, “Ocean City’s oldest amusement” (now in its 60th year), the test dummies had leaks that had gone undetected. They had lost a substantial amount of water, causing them to lose their mass and rigidity and thereby fall off the ride and land on the roof of the Ebb Tide Suites next door.
PC: via NBC-10 Philadelphia
No one was hurt. A roofer came to repair the hotel and the test dummies were trashed.
“Obviously it’s not something that would ever happen with a person in it,” Hartley told a local news channel. “You know you don’t lose rigidity in a person. The lap bar comes down. You’re secured in there.”
“The lap bar did not fail,” Hartley said. “When the ride came back in, they checked all the safety harnesses. Everything was in the exact same position, still locked. It’s just the bags shrunk down like a popped balloon. It goes from large and filled to pretty much nothing.”
“Safety is our top priority,” Hartley continued. “It’s something we do every single day. We’re checking the rides in and out. We’re going to have to do a better job at checking those tubes and making sure there are no leaks obviously before we send them out.”
The 125-foot-tall roller coaster launches at a speed of 64 miles per hour and includes a drop that goes beyond 90 degrees. Patrons must be a minimum of 48″ tall to ride it. The coaster opened at Playland’s Castaway Cove in 2016.
GaleForce has been problem-free since the incident and has been running normally ever since.
*** Huge thank-you to Mark O. of Miles To Memories for the heads up about this topic!
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
2 comments
I dunno. One dummy I could see, but two at the exact same time seems a stretch.
Yeah, I know.
I dunno….