Posted on 06/25/2007 12:06:35 PM PDT by John Cena
Is that a medical term?
That picture makes me wonder what got in the way of her legs?
I have gone on acraphobia at 6 flags GA many times. It is similar to the ride where this accident occurs. It is awesome. You are basically free falling at full speed until you get about 10 feet from the ground. It stops suddenly. No matter how many times you go on it, you cannot stop the adrenaline. Your body always reacts like you are going to hit the ground. It was one of my families favorite rides.
Simple term when an unattended object is subject to the rules of gravity.
Simply put the bones and blood vessels in the severed appendage are so badly damaged it may risk infection anyway.
I think that when it was severed the limb was still in free fall. Then probably thrown into the gears and other nasty mechanical things that exist underneath the machine.
But then again I only am Combat Lifesaver qualified all I know is to elevate, tourniqet and reassure.
An earlier news report said the park sent the limbs to the hospital with the teen.
I'm not so much afraid of the designers as the maintenance of the equipment.
We had a fatal accident on a carnival ride here in MA a year ago. It seems that the operator replaced an old bolt with one he picked up at Home Depot, which, believe it or not, didn't match the specs.
Makes sense. Do you think the ride was under-designed, or that someone either failed to inspect the equipment or failed to maintain the cables properly?
Rumor is the cable was a smaller diameter than the specs called for by the designer of the ride Intamin. Also that it was recently replaced.
If I were to don my foil hat I would suspect a Chinese involvement. I work in a concrete batching facility and we make concrete products which needless to say are heavy, in purchasing lifting hooks, chains and cables I have found repeatedly than if its stamped “Made in China” it will fail prematurely.
There are more than one system of brakes, involved, just for that reason. It’s called “redundant redundancy”.
LOL
So you would tell one of your guys, I want to reassure you that your limb went, "splat"?
I think it fairly obvious that the ride had a braking system, and that braking system worked. Or all the people on the ride including the young lady whose legs were severed would have been killed when the ride slammed into the ground at 56 miles per hour.
For what it’s worth, at 13 I was just hitting five-ten.
I can't visualize the mechanisms and design for this ride. A free fall from that height would be ~72MPH, so the cables are controlling the seat speed at all times. The cable became disconnected on the way up. I do consider it a design flaw to have uneducated folks, that have no control over the situation, exposed to a loose cable in motion. That kind of thing is for folks who are working with, setting up, and controlling the mechanism and load. ...like a crane, or winch operator.
W/o seeing it, I'd guess the cable was installed improperly and ended up taking most of the load(load balance), or the end "splice" was bad. Neither of which might be readily apparent. could also be that the design allowed for a transient unbalanced condition between the cables. That would be apparent if there were wear marks on the seat guides corresponding to the seat cocking. At any rate, the cables should have been contained behind plates, or a strap placed to restrict cable motion in the event of one of the cables becoming loose, or broken.
That's a good point.
The manufacturer of the Superman Tower of Power says it did not supply the cable that sliced off a girl's feet at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom on Thursday. The ride's cables and wire ropes would have had the need for replacement at least several times since the ride opened in 1995, but those replacement parts did not come from Intamin. The company says it has not supplied parts for the ride for 13 years.
Intamin doesn’t make cable, it buys it, so there claim is irrelevant. Intamin’s design failed to provide guarding to prevent loose and broken cables from moving into areas where uneducated folks are expected to be present.
However, do you think whether Intamin makes or buys the cables is relevant to the question of Six Flag's proper replacement of the cables? All that I'm suggesting is that one would assume that cables purchased from Intamin would meet their design specs, whether manufactured by Intamin or not.
If Six Flags replaced the cables with ones that failed to meet or exceed Intamin's specs, then don't you think Six Flags could be held liable for negligence in its cable-replacement choice? That question is independent from Intamin's liability for negligent design.
I was attempting to say that Six Flags better hope it was quite careful in replacing cables with ones that met or exceeded the specs of the ones it would have purchased from Intamin. Even if it maintained the cables religiously, if it used an eight-strand cable instead of a ten-strand, or a cable that was 1/32" smaller in diameter . . . you have a happy plaintiff's lawyer.
None of which minimizes your correct observations about absence of a guard
Sometimes I'm as incoherent when I write as I am when I talk. The only different is that my fingers don't drool on the keyboard.
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