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Hopi Hari Theme Park 2011 - Brazil


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sorry if there is mistakes doing this on bad wifi on a phone... Just did the giant drop in japan today and that one definitely didn't have seat belts, it was just 1 set of buttons to lock them and unlock them, i know its a seperate model but i have seen them dropping the gyro drop at lotte world with restraints open before, once when it broke down in the middle of the day they sent it up a couple of times with the restraints open which kind of freaked me out since that's another tower without seat belts so it was quite unnerving to watch it drop without closed restraints, so the system will allow it under certain conditions, maybe somebody left it in maintenance mode?

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One part of the problem IMO is that many parks use low-income students as ride-ops. Only very few parks still use full-employed personel on their rides - and after years of experience you simply "know" your ride. Those ride-ops can - like Scotty - say that their ride "sounds wrong". I had it years ago on the Alpina-Bahn that a ride ops said to change trains as the one rolling in "has a banging wheel-assembly". I doubt that many students with a few hour hands-on training will notice such things.

 

Next to that I always test the restraints myself - as in holding them and trying to push them up with full strength. As the saying goes: Trust is well - Control(ing yourself) is better.

 

Next to that in my experience most rides have measures to prevent launch with an open restraint. There're LEDs red/green for the ride-attendants and the ride-ops wont get green light as a cicuit runs through all restraints and only if all restraints are closed the cicuit is closed. Schwarzkopf and Huss use such systems. Of course these systems could also fail due to material fatigue. Sadly no system is perfect after years of aging...

Edited by simon8899
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Even on automatic mode, it could run with restraints open.

The girls' mother said in an interview that she asked her daughter "is your restraint locked" and the girl answered yes and forced the restraint and it was locked.

But still, no operator checked it.

 

As far as I know, the seat belt is not mandatory, just recomended. Still, once the park does adopt the seat belt, I don't think they should run that seat if it doesn't have one.

 

Even if everything runs fine, it still doesn't look good.

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Even on automatic mode, it could run with restraints open.

The girls' mother said in an interview that she asked her daughter "is your restraint locked" and the girl answered yes and forced the restraint and it was locked.

But still, no operator checked it.

 

As far as I know, the seat belt is not mandatory, just recomended. Still, once the park does adopt the seat belt, I don't think they should run that seat if it doesn't have one.

 

Even if everything runs fine, it still doesn't look good.

 

Not sure what the standards are down there but up here the ops are required to manually check that all restrainst are in the locked position by pulling & or pushing on them.Still there is the possibility that both cylinders failed on the way up in that particular seat but we must wait till the investigation is complete before jumping to any conclusions.

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I just talked to another park that owns an Intamin Drop Tower. The seat belt is required by Intamin.

 

The ride operator is supposed to check every restraint and seat belt, yes. But he might not have done that.

 

even in US, I've been to several parks where operators just don't care about checking restraints..

 

I'm really looking forward to the results of the investigation.

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ohhhhh my, That's terrible! I'm beginning to think that these Drop Towers are not very safe anymore.....

Using that logic, don't ever get in a car again! Have you seen how many people die in cars EVERY SINGLE DAY?!?!?! They aren't safe!!!!

 

I always use the car argument when people try and tell me that rides are unsafe. It's very irritating.

 

Keep in mind, joco07, the only reason why we are hearing about this news is BECAUSE it rarely happens. After the Costa Concordia accident, people were all up in arms saying they will never go on a cruise again. WHY?! Accidents are so rare, hence why it was big news!!! I also hear people say that airplanes aren't safe. Again, the only reason why we hear about plane crashes and what not is because they just don't happen that often, so when they do, IT IS NEWS.

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The police technicians released the first update on the Hopi Hari accident. They didn't find any mechanical failure on the ride. Now they are investigating human failures.

Still, they have a huge question to answer: how did the girl fall if the restraint is working properly?

 

The final report on the investigation will be released in 30 days.

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The police technicians released the first update on the Hopi Hari accident. They didn't find any mechanical failure on the ride. Now they are investigating human failures.

Still, they have a huge question to answer: how did the girl fall if the restraint is working properly?

 

The final report on the investigation will be released in 30 days.

 

Very interesting, please keep us posted. Humans are remarkable creatures, they can really do lots of odd things, some of which result in death.

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Humans are remarkable creatures, they can really do lots of odd things, some of which result in death.

And some of which results in the most amazing pornography I've ever seen...but that's a thread for another time!

Edited by robbalvey
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saw this on screamscape, the video is worth a watch.

 

This video shows the ride being tested by inspectors during the investigation.

 

 

 

MOD EDIT: To be more descriptive, this video does not show the accident.

 

MOD EDIT: Link removed, no longer points to the video

Edited by gisco
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Jesus Christ! That's really scary!

 

The thing is:

The police inspected, at first, the wrong seat. That's why they didn't find any mechanical problem. Then, they realized the girl was seating in an out-of-order seat and took a new look at the ride.

That restraint used to be lock all the time. For some reason, that day, it was unlocked. So the operator called his supervisor and said "the forbidden seat is unlocked" to wich, the supervisor replyied "ok, I'll the maintenance. Keep the ride running". (this is on the police information, I'm not making it up).

 

Well, if the operator new that seat was forbidden and maintenance was on the way, why the hell, did he let the girl seat overthere?

 

That is the question that must be answered.

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OMG that is a shocking video, now I completely understand that this will end up being a mix of "Operator Error" and "Mechanical Malfunction" But I now wonder how long this Giant Drop will be at Hopi Hari for before reduced ridership gets it removed. I have to say I would be doubtful about riding it after seeing that video, and ordinarily I love Freefalls!

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That seat had beeing closed for 10 years, since they found out a taller person, sitting overthere, would hit the scenery around the tower with his foot (that's what the park's attorney said, actually confirming an old urban legend).

 

so I guess they just didn't do maintenance on it. Also accoarding to the attorney, the restraint was supposed to be locked down, so no one would sit on it.

 

Questions that must be asked:

 

Why did not the park seal that restraint?

Why was the restraint unlocked that day?

Why, even though the operator knew the seat was broken, he let her ride there?

Why, even though the girl's mother warned him about the lack of the seat belt, he let the girl ride?

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Jesus Christ! That's really scary!

 

The thing is:

The police inspected, at first, the wrong seat. That's why they didn't find any mechanical problem. Then, they realized the girl was seating in an out-of-order seat and took a new look at the ride.

That restraint used to be lock all the time. For some reason, that day, it was unlocked. So the operator called his supervisor and said "the forbidden seat is unlocked" to wich, the supervisor replyied "ok, I'll the maintenance. Keep the ride running". (this is on the police information, I'm not making it up).

 

Well, if the operator new that seat was forbidden and maintenance was on the way, why the hell, did he let the girl seat overthere?

 

That is the question that must be answered.

 

Not only that but why did he keep loading & running the ride while waiting for maintenance to show up? Up here ops usually make an announcement via the PA system that a ride needs to cease operation temporarily if there is a problem that maintenance needs to take a look into.

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Not only that but why did he keep loading & running the ride while waiting for maintenance to show up? Up here ops usually make an announcement via the PA system that a ride needs to cease operation temporarily if there is a problem that maintenance needs to take a look into.

 

well, that seat was not supposed to be loaded. He was supposed to keep running the ride. The only reason maintenance was on the way was to lock again the restraint. Meanwhile, if the operator had done his job of not letting anyone in that seat, the girl would be alive.

 

I've been a ride op in a major US theme park and I've done that several times...

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That seat had beeing closed for 10 years, since they found out a taller person, sitting overthere, would hit the scenery around the tower with his foot

 

At least on the bright side, the park didn't have to sacrifice the scenery

 

That video is frightening. I thought in my head that someone might be able to hold down the restraint, but the video shows how the restraint swings up and out.

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That's pretty frightening to see, especially with my previous mentioned first drop tower experience. What I saw in the video is what I at the time assumed would have happened with us on the CGA tower: ride drops, restraints open (perhaps not as free as this video) and yea... I always visioned/re-imagined our scenario and thought of different things I would do if I had discovered we weren't secure...one being hugging that restraint for dear life...but the video just proved that would do no good. The other thing (provided discovery was soon enough) would be to jump out and suffer some broken bones depending on height. But that's all in the past now, all a bunch of 'what-ifs' I sometimes think about.

 

If this cabin were to be out of commission, why didn't they caution tape the entire thing or better yet, just remove the cabin off the tower so no mistake could have been made, especially if there were possible problems with a taller rider? Was there some kind of requirement that all 6 cabins are to run on that given tower, whether if it can load passengers or not?

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That's pretty frightening to see, especially with my previous mentioned first drop tower experience. What I saw in the video is what I at the time assumed would have happened with us on the CGA tower: ride drops, restraints open (perhaps not as free as this video) and yea... I always visioned/re-imagined our scenario and thought of different things I would do if I had discovered we weren't secure...one being hugging that restraint for dear life...but the video just proved that would do no good. The other thing (provided discovery was soon enough) would be to jump out and suffer some broken bones depending on height. But that's all in the past now, all a bunch of 'what-ifs' I sometimes think about.

 

If this cabin were to be out of commission, why didn't they caution tape the entire thing or better yet, just remove the cabin off the tower so no mistake could have been made, especially if there were possible problems with a taller rider? Was there some kind of requirement that all 6 cabins are to run on that given tower, whether if it can load passengers or not?

 

It is possible to disable the car from running if there's a problem....SFA has done this for years on their tower with the middle car not running at all while the other two were.Another thing that they could've done was simply remove the harness from that seat,surely doing that would serve to deter guests from riding in that particular seat but what should've been done was to remove the exterior theming structure when it was determined that there were clearance issues relating to taller guests,no park in the US would even bother spending the extra money on that type of excessive theming especially if doing so put riders at risk of injury.

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I actually remember seeing one of CGA's Drop Tower cabins missing when I began visiting regularly in 2007, meaning the tower ran only 5 of them. I decided to do some digging in the TPR index on Hopi Hari and on one of the trip reports, it appears that one of the cabins were actually not present.

Not sure if this was the death cabin or not, that was not going up with the rest of the loaded cabins (as I don't see any number on it).

 

On the other hand, this image shows the death cabin with riders in it. So I assume that it had been working fairly recently judging from the photo.

 

This seat that seems to be the hot topic, was it just that one end seat that had the possible clearance issues or was it the entire cabin that was at risk with taller riders? At this point, I should probably read through the thread, may answer several of my questions; I'm sure I'm missing some details.

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I'm relieved to learn the investigation is uncovering some plausible answers. It had been quite disconcerting to think that, even in this day and age, it could've been impossible for anyone to figure out what happened. Maybe that wasn't a realistic concern, but considering past events that provided only inconclusive evidence, I couldn't help but wonder.

 

On the other hand, the fact that this wasn't a freak accident makes it much more troubling in some ways.

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