How a Carowinds Debacle Impacts Disney
This week, Carowinds, a Cedar Fair theme park in Charlotte, North Carolina, has earned precisely the kind of attention nobody wants.
On Friday, June 30th, an alert park guest recognized a safety hazard on a popular roller coaster.
This person’s attentiveness saved the day, but Carowinds will face questions regarding this incident for a long time to come.
Let’s talk about how this disaster at Carowinds happened and how it will impact Disney.
A Heroic Father
A 45-year-old father spent the holiday weekend like many parents did.
Jeremy Wagner took his daughter, his son, his niece, and the son’s friend to Carowinds.
Since July 4th wasn’t until Tuesday this week, theme park crowds varied widely across North America.
Carowinds wasn’t that busy, which isn’t too surprising. The lesser theme parks have struggled under the burden of the pandemic.
The lack of crowds allowed Wagner’s daughter and niece to ride the signature attraction at Carowinds a lot.
According to the parent, the two teenagers rode Fury 325 six times. I mention this because the next part of the conversation will freak you out.
Once you hear it, you’ll understand how Wagner must have felt this past weekend.
When Wagner’s daughter indicated that they wanted to ride Fury 325 one more time, he decided to return to the car and drive it to the entrance gate.
This tactic allowed his kids to save some walking to the parking lot. Plus, they got to ride one of the world’s best roller coasters again.
Fury 325 has consistently ranked at the top of the Golden Ticket Awards as one of the best steel roller coasters ever built.
I should add that Cedar Fair, the owners of Cedar Point, purchased Carowinds in 2006.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Cedar Point knows that its most iconic attraction is Millennium Force.
Once Cedar Fair took over Carowinds, executives decided to build the deluxe version of Millennium Falcon at the North Carolina park.
Enter Fury 325, which travels at a top speed of 95 miles per hour. It also includes a vertical decline of 81 degrees at one point.
In layperson’s terms, that means straight down.
The Fury 325 Debacle
Fury 325 hasn’t won the title of Best Steel Roller Coaster by accident. It’s a thrill ride for the ages.
For Wagner and his family and anyone else at Carowinds last week, Fury 325 now signifies a Final Destination kind of escape.
Oddly enough, while writing that sentence, I remembered that 2008’s Final Destination 3 actually used the same premise.
That’s the kind of disaster we’re discussing here. In the movie, someone gets a premonition that a part will fail on a high-velocity roller coaster.
The outcome involves everyone onboard dying in a horrific crash. Friends, that nearly happened at Carowinds this past weekend.
In a wild twist of fate, Wagner stopped and turned around at the park entrance. He wanted to admire the view of Fury 325.
Suddenly, he noticed, well, this:
@bbcnews North Carolina amusement park, Carowinds, confirmed that the Fury 325 was shut down for repairs. #NorthCarolina #AmusementPark #Rollercoaster #BBCNews
That one’s gonna haunt me. The worst theme park story I ever covered involved similar negligence, albeit at a waterpark.
Basically, the maintenance crew at Carowinds failed to notice this crack in a support pipe on one of the fastest rides ever built.
Had that mistake propagated for much longer, a calamity would have befallen everyone on board.
They literally would have ridden a roller coaster off the dislodged track, into the sky, and ultimately to their doom.
Remarkably, the father thought to record a video to prove to the workers that they needed to close Fury 325 immediately.
Wagner reported that he had to make several attempts and left the park not knowing whether they had.
Thankfully, Carowinds did close Fury 325 at some point Friday, although we don’t know when. It’ll obviously remain offline for an extended period.
Most importantly, nobody suffered an injury…solely thanks to Wagner.
The Odd Benefit of This Incident
Someone I occasionally watch on YouTube has posted this video:
That’s an excellent breakdown of what happened and a design choice that shouldn’t have been made.
In watching that, your appreciation of Disney likely increased immeasurably.
Imagineers don’t make mistakes like this, as Disney’s safety standards remain the gold standard in the industry.
For Carowinds officials and several others, this blemish will fester indefinitely.
First, Carowinds likely didn’t want to close a ride on or around July 4th. Theme Park businesses need the money right now.
The industry continues to struggle under the sustained duress of the pandemic. And that’s another key facet of this conversation.
At several points during the pandemic, I indicated that something like this would happen. While I’m mortified by it, I’m wholly unsurprised. It was inevitable.
Safety standards slipped for some companies as the combination of budget shortfalls, significant inflation, and the Great Resignation caused a triple-whammy effect.
My relief here is that an incident like this occurred without anyone suffering an injury.
Wagner and his family will tell this anecdote forever about how much peril they faced by riding Fury 325 six times that day.
However, in the wake of those events, EVERY major theme park has had maintenance teams working around the clock to re-check safety standards.
This incident doubles as a warning signal to the rest of the industry. Anyone who had been putting off inspections certainly did them after the Fury 325 debacle.
We should all be thankful this happened in time for July 4th crowds.
Otherwise, who knows how many similarly ticking time bombs were in danger at North American theme parks?
How the Fury 325 Disaster Impacts Disney
First, let me be clear. This incident will harm Carowinds for the foreseeable future. It’s an inexcusable mistake, and they’re already getting dragged for it.
North Carolina and South Carolina officials claimed that they were on-site this past weekend to perform inspections.
Folks, that’s bureaucracy at its finest. I hadn’t mentioned this part yet, but Carowinds technically resides in Fort Mill, South Carolina as well.
The park resides on the state line between the Carolinas. That’s two different state governments whose safety officials should have been monitoring Carowinds. Oops.
So, we have Carowinds’ maintenance crew, Carowinds’ management team, and safety inspectors in North and South Carolina to blame here.
Now, let’s translate that idea to Disney. Remember how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took legislative control of safety inspections?
What we’ve witnessed with Fury 325 is the level of safety oversight we get under state governments. And I’d expect Florida to be worse than the Carolinas.
Many of the recent governmental assignments have come via political favors rather than meritocracy.
To wit, none of the members of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District claims any theme park experience.
In fact, that’s one of the new rules. For reasons beyond understanding, nobody who has worked at a park recently can accept the gig.
Ordinarily, you should be freaked out by this knowledge. Thankfully, Disney management consists of a bunch of pros.
The Fury 325 Incident Proves Disney Safety Measures Are Better
Leaders have cast members performing ride maintenance every day.
Fail-safe measures prevent attractions from operating if they’re running at less than 99 percent efficiency.
That’s not even hyperbole. It’s the actual math of the system. If more than one percent of checks fail, the attraction closes immediately.
That statement obviously doesn’t apply to structures, as I’m referencing automation only.
Of course, that’s the reason why cast members walk every inch of the attraction.
A crack in the structure of a Disney ride is a wildly unlikely scenario.
As the YouTube video indicated, the problem stems from the choice of pipe connections.
Disney spares no expense in ensuring that all its pieces provide the most durability and structural integrity.
Still, I suspect that this past weekend’s events at Carowinds helped Disney’s cause a bit more.
Management won’t need to push cast members to walk the grounds in search of safety issues.
That viral image of a 95-mile-per-hour roller coaster about to shoot straight off the track will provide plenty of motivation for the foreseeable future.
That’ll be true at every theme park for the rest of this summer. The Fury 325 near-catastrophe serves as a cautionary tale for something that almost happened.
We all owe our gratitude to Jeremy Wagner for saving countless lives at Carowinds that day.
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Feature Photo: Carowinds