September 24, 2009, 8:50A
Re: Joyland park bought Greezed Lightnin from SFAW. But it's still not operating.
Unfortunately the ride had to be purchased hastily, because Six Flags was hell bent on getting that land cleared right away. When the Joyland Park owners started doing tests for the foundation they ran into ground water. In order to properly secure the footings they would need to dig much, much deeper than they originally anticipated, and the cost was significantly higher than they had allocated for construction. They looked at other alternatives, such as other locations in the park but either ran into other water table problems, or underground utilities or pipelines. They also had engineers work out some type of floating footings, but the Stengel firm would not approve the alternate arrangement, and without their approval, insurance would have been unobtainable. The last I heard was that they were going to give up and put the coaster up for sale.
The sad thing is, had they been given more time to check things out before making a purchase, they probably would have ended up with Viper (the Schwarzkopf Looping Star). Although that was a permanent park version, that model had originally been designed as a portable coaster and didn't need much in the way of footings.