Originally published at: Ferris wheel at Florida's infamous ICON Park strands 62 riders for hours | Boing Boing
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“somebody call the fire department…”
“…I am too busy filming this fire to use my phone”
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Fingerman’s third postulate of media coverage: The only news reported from an amusement park will be anything but amusing. (“Well that depends on how many times one is likely to make ‘Bwahahahaha!’ sounds, now doesn’t it?”)
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To be fair, in addition to amusing news, more horrifying news involving actual serious injury or death at an amusement park will also be reported. What doesn’t get reported is the “The day at the park was great and a fun time was had by all” story, but maybe that isn’t news.
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Ferris Stranding… Sounds like a cool game.
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yes, but it is only a brief respite from the gathering zombie horde.
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I’m struggling to understand this failure. Was the problem that loss of power engages a brake of some sort such that rotating the wheel manually wasn’t possible until power was restored? Similar to how truck brakes require air pressure to disengage? That’s what it sounds like from the article. If so, it’s disappointing that there isn’t a manual way to turn the wheel for just such an event. What if a storm knocks out power for days? And do they not have backup power?
Given the large shower of sparks that was visible it seems likely that the root cause of the issue wasn’t just “power loss” but more likely “power loss and/or circuit breakers tripping due to a significant electrical short.” In that scenario it would be dangerous to try to restore power without first understanding and isolating the root issue. And who knows if they had a qualified and knowledgeable electrician on site at the time of the event. Maybe it took some time to get the right people to show up in response. (Of course they should keep such personnel on site at all times, but I would definitely not be surprised if a sketchy park like this doesn’t.)
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That doesn’t answer why they couldn’t rotate the wheel manually “until power was restored” though.
I think that in this case “manually” means something like “manual override of the motors” or possibly using a backup motor system. This is a huge Ferris wheel and not something that could be rotated without some kind of a motor.
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I kinda wonder if there couldn’t be a manual crank of some sort for safety purposes. You’d need a very low gear ratio, but a lot of cranking is better than people being stranded for hours or even days in a big storm. I’m not a Ferris wheel engineer so maybe there’s a good reason they can’t do that.
In the end, the evacuation took less than 4 hours. I’d wager that manually cranking a Ferris Wheel that size would have taken longer.
I was once involved in a recovery effort for a stuck roller coaster where a train had to be manually winched up a hill. It took about 12 or so hours of a team of workers in shifts continually cranking on a winch in order to get it up to the top. Fortunately the guests had already been evacuated via cherry-picker.
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