• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Woman dies while riding roller coaster

Status
Not open for further replies.
S

ShadyLurker

Member
These kind of stories sometimes scare me because I love roller coasters.

But then I remember you're much, much more likely to die driving to the park and forget about it.
 
P

Pooya

Member
It's a horrible way to go, it's not just falling, dropping out at high speed like that... it's a not a scene I ever want to witness. Rest in peace.
 
A

AstroLad

Hail to the KING baby
If something is supposed to click X times, you'd think they'd make that clear to people getting on the ride instead of leaving it for people to figure out for themselves. I've always thought at parks the people are almost a bit too lax in checking for this kind of stuff, even on the rides where it seems totally critical. I'm way more concerned about making sure I'm strapped in right than I am scared of any ride itself, and it's kind of totally up to you given the little diligence that goes on. But click once instead of three times -- how are you even supposed to know that even if you are paying attention?
 
T

TylerD

Member
ShadyLurker said:
These kind of stories sometimes scare me because I love roller coasters.

But then I remember you're much, much more likely to die driving to the park and forget about it.
Click to expand...

Exactly. How many MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of people have ridden the Texas Giant over the years and how many have died? Looks like the answer is 1.


If I were you people, I would be terrified of the drive to the amusement park.
 
Wiktor

Wiktor

Member
I was hoping the woman who died would be the crazy lady who wanted to marry a rollercoaster. Dying in loving embrace of your spouse doesn't seem all that bad
 
W

whitehawk

Banned
numble said:
testcuud2.gif
Click to expand...
I love coasters but... Nope.

edit: I need a video of this though.
 
Hale-XF11

Hale-XF11

Member
Whenever I get on a coaster, first thing I do is make absolutely sure my harness is tight and not moving. I tug on it good and hard to see how strong it is. If I think something's wrong, I'll yell for an attendant. Safety first.
 
D

Defect

Member
I go to the Six Flags in NJ every summer. I only had one problem when on a coaster.

Last year or two years ago I was on Bizarro (Medusa) and was buckled and everything. It started to go but then my shoulder restraint came loose. I freaked the fuck out and forced that shit back in. Was scared that whole ride.


I'm going this Tuesday too so this story scares me.
 
T

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
Wiggler said:
Whenever I get on a coaster, first thing I do is make absolutely sure my harness is tight and not moving. I tug on it good and hard to see how strong it is. If I think something's wrong, I'll yell for an attendant. Safety first.
Click to expand...

Yeah me too. This story is fucking awful.
 
G

Guhnmystro

Member
Lamel said:
I think I'm gonna be sick. That is not a fucking job to get lazy at...
Click to expand...

As someone who manages ride operators at a local amusement park, paying these workers minimum wage to work in the heat for 10 hours and be impeccable with the same routine every 30 seconds is asking a lot from 18 year olds. There's a reason that there's a gigantic turnover rate at amusement parks.

Also, this type of thing is my nightmare while working. Back in the 90's a girl released her restraints and tried switching seats with her friend while going up the lift. Lost her footing, fell 80 feet and hit support beams on the way down, died in the hospital. Crazy stuff.
 
T

TylerD

Member
From: http://www.asktheodds.com/

The odds of dying on a roller coaster are 1 in 300,000,000 (that’s 300 million for those who stopped counting). The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission stated that there were approximately two deaths per year, attributed to a roller coaster accident.

Without knowing all of the details, some general odds can still be roughly concluded. Your odds of dying in a car crash, over the span of your entire life, are somewhere in between 1 and 50 and 1 and 100. When broken down on a per year basis, your odds of dying in a vehicle crash would somewhere in between 1 and 4,000 and 1 and 8,000. Currently, roughly 40,000 people per year die in car accidents in the United States.
Click to expand...

My condolences to the family and those that witnessed the death.
 
W

whitehawk

Banned
Guhnmystro said:
As someone who manages ride operators at a local amusement park, paying these workers minimum wage to work in the heat for 10 hours and be impeccable with the same routine every 30 seconds is asking a lot from 18 year olds. There's a reason that there's a gigantic turnover rate at amusement parks.

Also, this type of thing is my nightmare while working. Back in the 90's a girl released her restraints and tried switching seats with her friend while going up the lift. Lost her footing, fell 80 feet and hit support beams on the way down, died in the hospital. Crazy stuff.
Click to expand...
How is that even possible? I've never seen a rollercoaster that gives the rider the ability to unlock restraints.
 
B

BladeoftheImmortal

Member
TheSeks said:
Sure, I'll admit it: I'm scared as hell of rollercoasters because you could possibly die on them.

"B-B-BUT FLYING IN PLANES AND SAFETY BLAH BLAH BLAH."

Same shit, different phobia. Just like I'm scared as hell of flying, I'm scared as hell of rollercoasters. Ya'll's crazy asses can get on them, but not me: Nope.
Click to expand...
its more crazy not to take a plane than to drive.

do you walk everywhere? more pedestrians are killed every year than plane paseengers in the last ten years.
 
N

Napoleonthechimp

Member
Sub_Level said:
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metr...n-texas-giant-roller-coaster-at-six-flags.ece

Our Tanya Eiserer spoke with Carmen Brown of Arlington, who says she was next in line to ride the Texas Giant behind the woman who fell to her death this evening. She told Tanya she witnessed the woman being strapped into the ride. She was sitting next to her son.

The woman, said Brown, “basically tumbled over and you just see her son [go], ‘Ahhh.’ They didn’t secure her right. One of the employees from the park — one of the ladies — she asked her to click her more than once, and they were like, ‘As long you heard it click, you’re OK.’ Everybody else is like, ‘Click, click, click.’ Hers only clicked once. Hers was the only one that went down once, and she didn’t feel safe, but they let her still get on the ride. …

“That could have been me.”

Brown said the woman’s young son was in a seat in front of his mother.

“We heard her screaming,” Brown said. “We were like, ‘Did she just fall?’”
Click to expand...

Yep, people are getting sued and could possibly face prison for negligence.
 
Bumblebeetuna

Bumblebeetuna

Member
Wow, how tragic. And the wife and I were thinking of going to Six Flags Over Texas this summer. Guess we'll be passing now. Though, I stopped riding coasters years ago. The big ones anyway.

The Texas Giant has never seemed "unsafe", but it was always a shaky, rattly, shitty coaster imho, though I never tried it with the new steel rail or whatever they added. I am not surprised to see someone fell out of the thing. The way it shakes and tosses you around, it always seemed an inevitability to me.
 
N

NaughtyCalibur

Member
Sub_Level said:
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metr...n-texas-giant-roller-coaster-at-six-flags.ece

Our Tanya Eiserer spoke with Carmen Brown of Arlington, who says she was next in line to ride the Texas Giant behind the woman who fell to her death this evening. She told Tanya she witnessed the woman being strapped into the ride. She was sitting next to her son.

The woman, said Brown, “basically tumbled over and you just see her son [go], ‘Ahhh.’ They didn’t secure her right. One of the employees from the park — one of the ladies — she asked her to click her more than once, and they were like, ‘As long you heard it click, you’re OK.’ Everybody else is like, ‘Click, click, click.’ Hers only clicked once. Hers was the only one that went down once, and she didn’t feel safe, but they let her still get on the ride. …

“That could have been me.”

Brown said the woman’s young son was in a seat in front of his mother.

“We heard her screaming,” Brown said. “We were like, ‘Did she just fall?’”
Click to expand...

This is why I'm reluctant to go on roller coasters. Not because of the ride itself, but because of negligence on the behalf of an 18-year old being paid jack shit on a 95 degree day.

I know deaths don't happen often, but if you really looked into it I'm sure you can find plenty of situations where somebody could have died. Hell, I coulda died once as I was on a ride where the safety bar didn't locked fully. I was holding on for dear life, nearly flew out.

That sort of thing probably happens more than people would like to know.

When I hop into a giant metal death machine designed to launch me 400 ft into the air at 160mph, I don't want some underpaid teenager to be strapping me in, I want the fucking dudes from NASA; or at the very least a responsible adult being paid well above minimum wage.
 
G

Guhnmystro

Member
whitehawk said:
How is that even possible? I've never seen a rollercoaster that gives the rider the ability to unlock restraints.
Click to expand...

Sometimes the restraints become stuck, there's a manual override on the side of the car that with a decent amount of upward pull can be used to unstick them when people are unloading. Its hard as hell for the passenger to do it (I barely could), but its possible. But at what point does the rider take responsibility for their fate? If you intentionally release your restraints there's no reason that the operators should be responsible for your dumb ass.

Edit: there's also a seatbelt in the ride as well.
 
T

Typographenia

Member
Yikes! My girlfriend and I just went to six flags magic mountain, and I was telling her about the texas giant ride. I didn't realize it had been revamped to not be all wood, but I will definitely reconsider bringing it up in conversation in the future. Geez, poor lady.
 
V

Vilam

Maxis Redwood
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/20/us/texas-roller-coaster-death/index.html

Gabe Flores said he was next in line at the amusement park.

"Me and my girlfriend were at the gates and the next ones to get on the ride ... the cars came in and there was a man and a woman in the front," he said. "The man was saying, 'let me out, let me out, my mom fell off.' "

The man and woman were distraught and speaking in raised tones, said Flores, who lives in Benton, Texas.

"There's a turn that's pretty steep, and the person behind her empty seat said she fell out there—just flew out," he said.

Flores did not see her fall, but park visitors told CNN affiliate WFAA they did.

"She goes up like this," Carmen Brown told the affiliate, raising her hand up in the air. "Then when it drops to come down, that's when it released and she just tumbled."
Click to expand...

Ugh, makes me absolutely sick to think about.
 
T

timetokill

Banned
Poor kid.

What really sucks is the kid probably asked his mom to go on the ride in the first place.
"Come on mom, Texas Giant! Oh man this is gonna be awesome!"

Mom probably just went on the ride to make her son happy.
 
D

Deleted member 30609

Unconfirmed Member
I thought I was desentised to a lot of this sort of thing, but this genuinely makes me feel fucking dreadful. The twitter account of the incident really set me off. Urgh.

:(
 
S

Salsa

Member
poor kid man

:/

I rode a rollercoaster once and hated it. Dont know why i'd wanna feel like that again, I can get plenty of adrenaline elsewhere.
 
N

NaughtyCalibur

Member
This prompted me to look into past amusment park fatalities and... Oh my god. :(

Friday, May 22, 1981 - In an accident in Rochester, New York, a 14-year-old female was crushed to death after having apparently fallen from an amusement ride. The ride featured electric-powered cars riding along a track. After the girl had left the car, she fell into a rotating barrel, which then forced her body through a 5-by-7-inch gap into a small space underneath the track of the ride.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm done with amusement park rides.
 
P

Persona7

Banned
TwiztidElf said:
I like fun parks and roller coasters, but there is no way I'd go on anything at SixFlags.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_at_Six_Flags_parks
Click to expand...

Years ago(maybe 2000?) me and some cousins/other family members went to Six Flags Magic Mountain and we were about to get on the ride Ninja. We walked along the side and we looked over at some bamboo and the fucking ride zoomed through maybe three feet from where we were standing near the sidewalk. The wind almost knocked us over. It was just open and anyone could have walked in there without even knowing. The red rail was obscured by tree branches.

They eventually blocked that side off with a fence and more shrubbery.


That same ride also struck and killed someone who scaled a fence to go retrieve a hat under that ride in 2008.
 
P

PotatoeMasher

Member
Kings Island must be relieved to have torn Son of Beast down after it started injuring people. That's the most intense coaster I've been on (opened as the tallest and fastest wooden coaster and was the first to have a loop). The POV videos still give me chills, even without taking the abuse of the rough ride again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AU1TdhP6e0
 
S

speedline

Banned
I find coasters intriguing, but have only been on a couple. I wouldn't say they are unsafe, but it's just not for me. I don't mind the speed, it's the height combined with the turns that make me feel uncomfortable.I like flying though, but it's not the same thing. I actually enjoy watching other people ride coasters or crazy fair rides, it's fun from a distance.
 
A

AniHawk

Member
my buddy and i were at knott's berry farm when we were 10. we were riding jaguar, which is actually a pretty mellow ride all things considered, but it has a couple of turns towards the end that make it mildly exciting. i was having a good enough time, and then i looked over at my friend and he was hanging on for dear life. the lap band had flown up and he was leaning forward to keep his grip.
 
I

I2amza

Member
Holy shit! She flew out of the roller coaster? I love roller coasters, and this is some freaky stuff.

Condolences to the family.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Barbie | Review Thread
News Rumor 6 7 8 9 10
465
40K
Woggleman replied
Bay Area horse molester sentenced to jail
2
61
5K
Buggy Loop replied
American Dream - The 3 million square foot, $5 billion "Post-Shopping Mall" opens
2
76
9K
nush replied
Southeast GAF Six Flags Over GA is retiring the GA Cyclone
3
1K
Alex_Mexico replied
America's oldest WWII Veteran dies aged 112
8
950
Pagusas replied
Top Bottom