Twenty-two patrons were stuck in midair for two hours on Monday when a ride broke down at Knott’s Berry Farm in Orange County, Calif.
After the riders were freed, two were taken to the hospital, the park said.
The ride, Sol Spin, is a six-armed pinwheel that can carry six riders on each arm. The pinwheel ascends and begins to spin, and the arms rotate independently as well.
The park rates Sol Spin a five out of five for “thrill level” and mandates that riders be at least 4 feet 6 inches tall to ride it.
“This thrilling ride is one for the brave!” the park says on its website. “Sol Spin sends guests on a thrilling adventure over six stories high as they rotate in all directions on one of six spinning arms. Each arm rotates 360 degrees independent of one another providing a different experience every ride.”
The riders on “freely rotating, floorless gondolas,” it promises, “gain a real sense of being airborne while suspended and flipping above the ground.”
This experience, in theory, provides thrills and pleasure to paying customers.
A reviewer at The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2017 when the ride opened that “the new Sol Spin thrill ride at Knott’s Berry Farm looks much scarier and more exciting from the ground than it really is when you get up in the air.”
The reviewer’s ride functioned properly, however. The experience was likely to have been much more distressing for Monday’s trapped riders.
Video taken from local news helicopters showed riders in their seats, harnesses over their shoulders, their legs dangling as they awaited rescue. Though many of the ride’s arms were tilted, no riders were upside down.
Knott’s Berry Farm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. In a statement provided to local news media on Monday, it said that “at approximately 2 p.m., the Sol Spin ride experienced technical difficulties,” causing the ride to stop. “We followed the ride manufacturer’s and Knott’s emergency procedures to safely evacuate the 22 guests by 4:30,” the statement said.
The park said that the two hospitalized riders were being evaluated “out of an abundance of caution.”
The park started in 1920, as it name implies, as a berry farm. It expanded to a fruit stand, and then a market, a tearoom and a gift shop. It moved into entertainment with a faux ghost town in 1940. By the 1960s, theme park rides had entered the mix. It attracts five million visitors a year.
It’s not unheard-of for visitors of theme parks to get something other than what they bargained for. In June, 30 people at Oaks Park in Portland, Ore., were stuck when AtmosFEAR, a wheel that spins riders high in the air, broke down. Their captivity was briefer, about 30 minutes, but their position was more harrowing as they were upside down. AtmosFEAR eventually reopened, but people are now given the choice of 260- or 180-degree rides instead of the full 360-degree experience available before the incident.
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