Guest thinks broken cable on Six Flags New England ride is more serious than the park says, gets a whole news article to make his case

It's only a non-event because nobody got hurt. This could have been a serious incident but the park lucked out and was able to explain it away as a minor malfunction. If that cable let loose while it was lifting a train the results likely would have been catastrophic. You guys can downplay and make fun of this guy's reaction all you want, but he is right. Perhaps you aren't as familiar with this ride as you think you are.

There are many assumptions being made as to why this could have been catastrophic, none of which are supported by evidence at this point. With all due respect Dave, how do you know a cable has never snapped on a boomerang while lifting a train? How do you jump to the conclusion that it would automatically be catastrophic?

At the end of the day, the Office of Public Safety (Bold for emphasis) in Massachusetts is saying this is a non-event. There's no reason at this time to think otherwise.

Yeah, I agree. I'd love to know how anyone makes the leap that this would have been "catastrophic" if the ride was loaded.

WOULD have been catastrophic? Nope, can't make that prediction... COULD have been catastrophic? I can see the concern there. I never would've thought a broken cable on a drop tower would result in someone losing their feet, but we all know how that turned out.

No, but if you logically think about the arrangement of the equipment, it's not hard to imagine. In the case of this specific ride, I can only imagine that the train would deploy into the course, and the cable would unspool under the tower after the train has moved into the course. It isn't going to beat the train to the bottom of the tower. If there was an extraordinary noise, I bet it was the catch car at the bottom of its run.

Most complex pieces of machinery are designed to fail to the most safe position. While not familiar with this ride's designed safety systems, I can only imagine that all failure possibilities were taken into account in the engineering of the ride. So who here on CB or in the media really knows? The engineers probably know.

I want to speculate on the design of the train, shielding of riders, etc, but cannot. However, I'm reasonably sure that had the train been loaded and operating during the failure, that things would have turned out ok.

Blah blah blah Kentucky Kingdom, blah blah blah Xcellerator. Completely different rides, but yes... excellent examples of what *can* go wrong.

Just noting that neither of the above were Vekoma rides....can't say whether that's pure chance or not.

Gator-
...and both are Intamin rides, also not sure if that's coincidence?