Massive Power Outages

[BrownStreak]

Reading all of these posts reminds me that when I worked at the former Camp Snoopy at Mall of America we lost power- something about a truck backing into something in the basement. I was working the camp bus and it was not at a full arch so the parents and I were able to unload all of the kids easily but the flume and coaster had to be walked down and the Tree Top Tumbler was up and when they got a cherry picker to evac it the power came back on.

 

---->Sidebar- The Tree Top Tumbler is by far my FAVORITE "flat ride," why aren't there more of them out there?!

 

Also when I worked at SFGAm I was chosen to test ride their sky coaster one morning- they had a list you could sign to be picked each day. They pulled me halfway up and I stopped and they never told me why and I hung there for 20 minutes before without any warning I was hoisted the rest of the way up- that sudden rise backwards was scarier than the ride itself!

[Homer]

Never experienced one myself.

 

However, I have heard stories of people being stranded on rides during that huge blackout back in 2003. I heard people walking down a majority of S:ROS' lift at SFDL because of that blackout.

[TatsuXtreme]

well, late 2006 when i went to magic mountain, the entire tatsu side of the park went down. more might of went down, but i dont know. the way that i found out was that i walked over to roaring rapids and noticed that it was completly drained! so i asked one of the ops if it was down for the day, and he said that there was a power outage. i was so pissed, tatsu was closed for pretty much the rest of the day, and so was roaring rapids.

 

 

this happened at around 2, the park closed at 6

[Jew]

One day @SFMM bird flew into the transformer in SFMM's parking lot and took out power to the whole park...

[LiamC]

Don't they happen all the time across the pond at Thorpe?

 

Yep they do, and Towers aswell. Infact, this weekend i was there, and there was a minor one in Ug Land resulting in the Ug Swingers going down and Rita aswell for a short while.

On the topic of parkwide power cuts, the last major one at Towers was last year if i recall, when Towers and Alton village went down aswell. I was about to board the Skyride when it happened, quite glad i didn't now!

[JamesMC]

I was at Six Flags Great America once when the power went out for about two hours. It wasn't really interesting or exciting. Most rides were out of commission and it was a hot day. People like me were just walking around sweating and baking in the heat and wondering if we should get in line for anything.

[King_K.]

I was at IOA back in 2002 and was exiting Spiderman, when a TM came to us and told us not to leave the giftshop cause there was a Tornado Warning, and the a Tornado was spotted in the area. There must've been at least 150 of us in the shop. The park then lost power for a good hour or so.

 

When the warning was over, everyone exited all the rides, shops, and restaurants. A whole lot of mayhem.

[NickAndrews]

At Alton Towers last year, pretty much everything in the park went apart from a few rides. Got stuck on the Skyride for about 45 minutes

[Moose]

The August 2004 outage occurred just as I was passing by Canada's Wonderland, coming home from Algonquin camping. Saw a few lift-walks. (Ironically, I was supposed to go for my first CP trip the next morning... moved it until that Sunday.)

 

I was working (at SFNE) at the time. It was so crazy (understandably so). All ride operators trying to call operations base at the same time because no one knew what was going on. Everyone thought it was just their ride. Besides rides going down, think of everything else operationally. The primary radio channels used are on repeaters (which also went out), so we had to move to backup channels, etc. Just a lot of confusion.

 

Objectively speaking, the park and staff handled it well and we didn't have rides in any difficult places. I think the irritated guests calmed down when they realized it was most of the Northeast and beyond.

 

I was there that day, but i remember things a bit differently. The park was affected for a bit, but everything got back up and running since that part of the Northeast was not affected by the blackout. I was in the wavepool at the time it occured. It (obviously) stopped. By the time we got back to the rides part, everything was operational again.