Fury 325 closed due to fractured support

That’ll be fine, and thanks for that information. It’s really interesting.
When I was a child my Southern Ohio family was somewhat impacted by the horrific failure of the Ohio/WVa Silver Bridge. Along Ohio’s state route 7 in Gallipolis there’s a memorial to those lost and an example of the piece that sheared causing the entire suspension bridge to plunge into icy water. I can’t look at one of those bridges without getting the heebie jeebies.
I’d think that a bridge and it’s construction (in terms of stress and load) would be more similar to a roller coaster than a multi-story building is. At least in terms of weight and stress distribution. And once again, what do I know? But that makes sense. I’ve always been morbidly interested in buildings and things that have collapsed, thinking there had to have been a bizarre sequence of events that would cause such a thing. Like a weakness exasperated by an unusual load or force. It’s always a big “what if” for me.
This is why some of our friends and family consider us to be dare devils and what causes others to say “I’d never get on something like that”. I’m just so glad Fury will have a chance to live on and nothing bad came because of this situation.

Pertaining to bridge design, TylerWS hit the nail on the head pertaining to LRFD and how capacities are factored down while loads are factored up. The more unpredictable the load, the higher the factor.

There's an additional wrinkle for bridges. We use different factors to think about lifespan of the bridge. In other words, can the bridge handle day to day cars and tractor trailers for 100 years vs. can the bridge handle an occasional very large load?

Can a bridge survive without every other beam? Perhaps for some amount of time, but the remaining beams will see a lot more stress than originally designed for and will probably fail faster than they would have otherwise. You're going to really beat up your bridge. Fatigue and cyclical loading are fickle things.

If a beam on a multi-girder bridge begins to fail, there will be plenty of signs. It's extremely rare for a beam to go from 100% capacity to 0% in an instant. Additionally, thanks to redundancy in the system, the loads carried by the failing beam will shed to the neighboring beams, which in reality have extra capacity thanks to the LRFD factors. This allows for some time to identify that there's a problem.

I suspect (and this where I go from bridge engineer to just some guy on the internet) that roller coasters are designed similarly. Can the ride survive after losing a support? Probably, for a time. That was actually proven for Fury. But if the ride continues to operate, what's the long term prognosis for that section of track and the nearby supports?

One thing I think the roller coaster designer would have going for them is a fairly predictable load. Anybody can drive just about anything over a bridge until they either get caught or something unfortunate happens.

Jeff:

are there standards bodies that set these standards?

Probably sort of.

Most engineering disciplines have an organization in the US that both approves various standards in the discipline, as well as defines what it means to be a Whatever Engineer as an undergraduate or masters student. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers performs this role for Civil Engineering. They have a large body of codes/standards, some of which certainly apply to these sorts of installations.

https://www.asce.org/public...-standards

Here’s what I love about our group here on this site. We have at least one of everything and one of my favorite things is when someone mysteriously surfaces with something to say. Like our knowledgeable BariMan, my new hero, who’s been a member since 2005 but has only posted 33 times. Now there’s someone who’s happy to lurk around until he has something to say that he deems absolutely worthwhile and necessary. Then there are some of us (ok, me) who show up everyday to just yak yak yak, and usually about nothing.
Thanks everyone for all of this great stuff. Now when I’m contacted by friends who show up with this news I’ll be armed with actual information and not just conjecture.

Yes. I’m sure there must be a ton of fault tolerance built into these things.

Although the video is pretty alarming.

Jeff:

There's a guy on PointBuzz that wants to tell you about critical thinking. 😆

Seriously though, are there standards bodies that set these standards? I saw some preliminary suggestion that the collapse of the Miami condo may have had something to do with extraordinary amounts of extra weight on the pool deck.

But that's obviously different than a coaster load, which is about as predictable as it gets.

I’ve seen the “the support is on the wrong side” argument on other sites too. Do people just not remember rope is a thing?

US building codes are typically based on standards developed by the International Code Council (ICC) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)/Structural Engineering Institute (SEI). The standards are written by these professional groups, and then adopted by local municipalities (with modifications if need be) to become code (i.e., legally enforceable). I know there is a provision in “ASCE/SEI-7 Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures” for amusement park structures, but I’m not familiar with it. I’ll take a look and see what it says.

It is interesting how diverse the reactions are to this incident.

Many have expressed their shock, terror, anger and disappointment that "this could have happened".

“I was trying to shoot the video, and my hands were shaking because I knew how quick this could be catastrophic,” Mr. Wagner said.

Conversely, I saw the video and thought how cool it was that ride track was supported by enough neighboring columns that it didn't affect the ride at all.

To be clear, there was a structural failure and no one noticed at the moment it happened. I think that's a great outcome.

I was most surprised about how little movement there was in the track despite being unsupported.

Alton Towers have certainly had to do some intensive proactive management of the Nemesis support structure which has led to the replacements.

(I submitted some photos of the rebuild, Jeff).

RCMAC:

When I was a child my Southern Ohio family was somewhat impacted by the horrific failure of the Ohio/WVa Silver Bridge.

I had never heard of this until now. Fell down an internet wormhole and ended up watching a whole documentary about the ordeal and how the bridge failed. Horrifying stuff.

And now Facebook is littered with fake pictures/accusations of Gatekeeper having a "cracked support".

I viewed the video as both terrifying (because, you know, "what if"?) but at the same time fascinating since it had no impact on the ride.

And I learned a lot in the last few pages of discussion.

I assume your wormhole had at least a mention of the mothman?

Off-Topic, but kinda related, When Wickid Twister first opened, didn't they have issues with the track cracking and had to weld it every day till they put the supports in to fix the issue? I mean that was over 20 years, ago. So the memory is a foggy.

EDIT: So, I was looking through RCDB, and you can see pictures of it before the extra supports were added.

https://rcdb.com/1571.htm#p=3823

https://coasterbuzz.com/For...w-supports

I was a ride op, on Ocean Motion/Chaos/Peanuts, it was actually shearing bolts, and they had to cut and re-bolt it almost daily...

If you see the videos of the Fury inspection, it has taken 2-3 days to do a complete track section by section track inspection, basically, guys mountain climbing the whole course and tying off before inspecting each bit.

Also looks like used multiple drones, maybe could be a daily thing as well, going forward.

Also took off the fiberglass wrap which makes it look worse, I assume Leviathon is going to get a thorough inspection now too, esp as cold and heat changes up there more severe than NC.

To be fair, all they had to do was walk around the ride with binoculars and they should have seen that thing. I give them credit for going the extra step and checking every inch of the thing but that wouldn’t have been necessary to catch the initial failure.

It looks like the one guy who initially took a picture of it, you know, and then told the park, is attention whoring and going on about how the park didn't take him seriously. Like us, he doesn't actually know the risk involved with running the ride in that situation.

Well, IMO the ride should've been e-stopped and shut down immediately upon discovery of a completely fractured support.

Yes there is redundancy, however at that time it would not have been apparent how long the support had been broken, and therefore impossible to immediately know whether other parts of the structure had been stressed and weakened as a result of bearing additional unintended loads, including the possibility of something whose subsequent failure could've caused casualties, like the box track spine and/or the welds holding the rails to the spine, or other support columns.

I do think it warrants a closer look to see why this guy allegedly wasn't taken seriously and why it took as long as it did to shut it down after he reported it.

Furthermore, another guest claims to have had images from a week prior that showed a large crack on that support beginning at the weld. It is a fair question to wonder why it wasn't detected sooner.

Now if I were this guy and I saw that pillar fractured from end to end, I would've gone straight to the ride and told them to e-stop it immediately, that a support was fractured, and I would have asked for a manager to ensure the extent of the damage was recognized and appreciated.

If it is true that he showed it to park personnel and wasn't taken seriously and/or that the ride wasn't closed immediately, I think this is also a flaw in internal procedures or execution thereof and also warrants examination.

And, if I were in his situation, and news media outlets were contacting me for interviews, I'd probably speak up too, especially if I hadn't been taken seriously by park personnel. I would call that out.

DA20Pilot:

Furthermore, another guest claims to have had images from a week prior that showed a large crack on that support beginning at the weld. It is a fair question to wonder why it wasn't detected sooner.

Keeps coming up, but where's the proof/source? Where is this picture? You can easily pull the EXIF data from the image and then see when exactly the picture was taken unless the data was stripped.

SteveWoA:

Where is this picture?

Right here?

Thanks, didn't see it posted.

Unfortunately, unable to pull any meaningful data from it, but obviously the crack is in a less, uh, failed state at that point.

But yeah, "oops!" says Carowinds maintenance :)

And assuming the info is correct (no reason not to at this point) then we can see exactly how far that crack progressed in that time frame - which, to me, seems like good info to have.