Carowinds roller coaster shut down after crack found in support pillar | USA TODAY



Carowinds said the park’s maintenance team is conducting a “thorough inspection” of the Fury 325 roller coaster after a crack was found in a pillar.

Related: North Carolina roller coaster closes after discovering crack on pillar https://bit.ly/2way0jF 

Video of the ride showed the support pillar moving out of place as Fury 325 passengers were on the roller coaster. Carowinds did not say how long repairs would take, but the rest of the park will remain open.

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#Rollercoaster #Carowinds #Caughtoncamera

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22 comments

  1. That's really not that difficult of a repair to undergo. All they have to do is weld another collar over top of the cracked portion. A good welding crew could get that repaired safely within about 2 hours.

  2. The fury is the 6th biggest giga coaster in the world and it’s doing this 💀

  3. They knew it was destroyed. Just getting their last couple rides in before they had to pay to fix it

  4. Some people are forgetting that every single woooden coaster out there sways like this, yet they’re all safe. Coasters are over designed and likely Fury could function safely even if that pillar was absent in the first place

  5. Man was killed when he fell from drop tower not long ago and here the Coasters are coming apart WHAT THE HALES?

  6. Personally, I think roller coasters are stupid. Anything like that is stupid. It was made by mankind and mankind is flawed. Why find enjoyment over something like that? People have died from a ride at an amusement park. We humans suck at engineering because eventually, it breaks.

  7. And that’s why I don’t go to these places

  8. When it said we do daily checks! 😂🤣 Aye right! 😂

  9. I'm no engineer but my past building experience lends me to believe there's simply not enough horizontal tie off's along with some type of perpendicular bracing forming a more stable skeletal framework for the very heavy shifting load of these cars that travel on that main rail. All those pylons acting as vertical support beams might be fine carrying the actual weight of the gondolas from the ground up but there's nothing there keeping those pylons tied together top to bottom disallowing vibrations & a shimmying motion. It just seems there should be far more steel tying that sparse frame together to alleviate the shimmying stress that I'm betting caused that cracked member to begin with.
    Again,, I'm no engineer but I'd lay a bet they'll have issues similar to this one again due to someone (the original engineering firm) skimping on steel work while foregoing a few calculations necessary to not only carry the weight of the nonstop motion of those cars that travel upon it but far more to do with the sideways shimmy/vibration of that enormous weight hitting those curves at breakneck speed causing tremendous stress at the same few points located all around the rail system & in particular the one that snapped attempting to stabilize & carry this entire system.
    IMO,, they simply haven't compensated for the stress of the sideways movement of such a dynamic ride & someone needs to take a closer look at how this thing's constructed.
    That's well over a ton of weight jack hammering those curves relentlessly daily & that one connection without being tied into others simply isn't cutting it..

  10. You don't have to be an NDT Inspector to discern that big ass crack at the most stressful area of that roller coaster. Who signed off the maintenance records? Probably "penciled whipped"!

  11. Inexcusable. This started as a small crack that propagated to an extreme failure over time. This was not a sudden issue, it could have been caught well before it became a major failure such as this!

  12. I'm not an engineer, but my eyes see that type of brace/coupler is not properly designed to counteract gravemetric forces incoming to said structural brace. and…

    Ouch, that hurts my "WTF" part of my forces in motion undersunderstanding.

    That an object in motion tends to… blah blah blah, unless acted upon another force.

  13. This should never get to this stage!

  14. I rode this ride a few months ago. Great ride! Hope they get it fixed soon so I can ride it again. And it just goes to show that you don't have to be a millionaire and take submersibles to the bottom of the ocean to potentially be the next victim in a long list of thrill seekers that paid to die without even realizing there was a problem! So… Let's get this thing fixed so I can ride it again!

  15. I hope that Carowinds doesn't go the way of Disney, devaluing its employees and safety protocols in favor of a few short-sighted dollars.

  16. Where is the public disclosure of the Daily Safety Inspection Documents that verifies the repeated claims by Carowinds???.
    Every single amusement park has these documentation protocols in place.

    Standard operating procedures/protocols for all amusement parks are as follows: Internal park Maintenance is supposed to conduct early morning safety inspections, consist in part:

    Checking the coaster train (Wheels, Locking Mechanisms, Etc.)
    Checking the tracks & structure for issues (like an enormous gash in a support pillar)
    Running the train trough a few ride cycles.

    Depending on the results of these inspections, maintenance either
    Signs off on them
    Makes any adjustments as needed
    Or
    Red Tags them (Lock out) prior to the ride operators arriving for opening.

    This internal daily safety inspection logs/documents serves as an internal “Checks & Balances” system to quickly verify these daily safety inspections and quickly identify any known areas of concern.

    Since Carowinds has No inclination to do so, and finally put this mystery to rest on their own accord, in the interest of the safety of the public, will someone in the News media and/or in an Authoritative Government oversight capacity, please press this issue with Carowinds and compel them to immediately provide this documentation to the public
    If everything is as aboveboard as Carowinds says they are, why the need for all of the secrecy?.

  17. This is exactly what happens when we pay no heed to the prophetic movie Idiocracy, and allow some of the Seven Sociopathic Pillars of Capitalism to be used as support structures at amusement parks.

  18. I never trained mine to be defensive and he was gentle and patient with us, even when my three year old sat right on his newly neutered nether region. 😮. But if a stranger came into the yard or knocked on the door, there was hell to pay. RIP Robby vom Kühlen Kesler Hause.

  19. The Seven Sociopathic Pillars of Capitalism are hard at work in this story. I'd be willing to bet my bottom dollar that the CEO is a Republican… Just like Stockton Rush.

  20. Wait it said its inspected every day so why was the ride still functional in that video. Oh emm geee.

  21. And I was just about to go there Good thing I didn't cuz I would have been on it