Eight college students rescued from vertical lift in Galveston

Normally I wouldn't post this sort of thing as news, but having to extract people with a ladder on a vertical lift is pretty exceptional situation. I would consider this nightmare fuel.

I thought all vertical lift coasters had an elevator platform evac system? Is that specific to the manufacturer or an optional add-on with purchase?

From this picture it appears there’s a platform attached to the side of the tower that can be raised up. Not sure what the exact use case is for or why they used a ladder truck instead.

Some articles on this story attribute the shutdown to a sensor error. Overall this incident is newsworthy because the bigger failure is either:

1) Park opened the ride (knowingly or unknowingly) without a working evac lift or

2) A sensor broke so bad that it caused the ride and the evac platform to not work.

There is one other possibility - the park was told to stand down from an evacuation attempt so that FD could take over, although given the absolute pain it is to bring in and position those trucks on a boardwalk, I have to discredit this idea as illogical.

It could be a combination of all three... Perhaps the fire department was better trained for this specific kind of situation. If I were in park management, I'd probably ask the fire department for help. Even if the evac platform was working, the riders were in a very awkward position. I love to see how they got them from ride vehicle facing the sky to the cherry picker's platform.

One of the benefits of that platform is that you can pull multiple people down at a time to speed up the process. If ops was worried about doing it themselves, they still could have let FD use their equipment.

If it is safe to unload in that basket (which I presume it is), that puts the spotlight back on management to have the appropriate knowledge and training so that you don't need the fire department to recover guests.

To your point LostKause, that would be a terrible design if none of the 50-ish Gerstlauer vertical lift coasters can be safely unloaded in that basket.

LostKause:

I love to see how they got them from ride vehicle facing the sky to the cherry picker's platform.

There's video embedded here - at about 1:15 you can see them basically backing someone out of the seat with the cherry picker behind and underneath. And basically the person goes into a fetal position which is what I would do.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/l...r-AA24mowG

We call it an "evac lift" but does anyone know if that is the actual purpose of it? Or is that a maintenance lift, or something Ops can use to raise up and calm stuck passengers until the FD can arrive?

Per USA Today, the "manlift usually used to evacuate riders from the coaster had mechanical issues".

The ABC News story that hambone linked to had all the heart of the story. Those poor kids. Looks like the USA Today story Mr. Six mentioned had the detail we coaster nerds were all wondering.

Mr. Six:

Per USA Today, the "manlift usually used to evacuate riders from the coaster had mechanical issues".

Hadn’t been used since the ride was built. FTFY

Mechanical issues or not, using something called a “manlift” isn’t very inclusive.

The safest possible thing would be to push the car over the top. I can't believe that they couldn't figure out how to do that. You'd think they might even have a manual crank to make that happen.

Now I can't get the image of the crank from the Mouse Trap board game out of my head.