Multiple people injured on Six Flags El Toro coaster

It always seems like the rides at Six Flags Great Adventure are not well taken care of. Nothing is shiny. Everything seems like it needs a tune-up. The park always seems to be focused on adding new stuff but not taking care of what they already have.

Then you have Intamin. Their coasters and rides are notorious for mechanical mishaps, some of them quite dangerous.

So when I saw this headline, I said out loud, "Of course."

I hope the riders are okay. Because people like El Toro, I hope SF figures out how to make it safe so they can keep it open for decades to come.

I've been done with SFGadv for a long time now.

Six Flags parks have been poorly maintained visually for at least the last decade Failing paint, lack of landscaping, weeds growing etc

Now we know the rides are not being mechanically maintained and are not safe

The company is laying off skilled employees, cutting operating hours and closing park sections. Bankruptcy seems like it’s coming again. Hopefully the next bankruptcy will see some of the parks with potential in better hands.

super7*:

Now we know the rides are not being mechanically maintained and are not safe

That's a pretty big assumption to make over one incident on an already problematic ride that hasn't even been fully analyzed yet and seems to have only resulted in minor injuries.

But it fits my preconstructed narrative so it must be true.

Properly maintained rides don’t fall apart

I haven’t been to Great Adventure in a minute, but I remember thinking that their coasters looked much more well maintained than at some of their sister parks. I also never felt like Toro was neglected in terms of maintenance. It always rode well. One or two trips I was on it was rougher than usual, but then it was better again on subsequent trips. To me, Six Flags has done much better in recent years with maintenance, at least compared to what they used to do. I guess really that’s not a great comparison, but it’s been a long LONG time since I’ve been to a SF park and thought, “I really could die today”.

Also, I don’t know that it is fair to say the ride is falling apart due to poor maintenance. It was a unique design of Intamin’s, one of only three or four—I don’t remember exactly—and it is something like 15 years old. Maybe even 20. I’m not great at engineering stuff or physics, but I do know that predicting how long a unique design, especially a wood prefab coaster, would last would be extremely difficult. Perhaps it is not poor maintenance at all but the natural end of the life cycle for such a ride.

super7*:

Properly maintained rides don’t fall apart

Based simply on the quotes in the media right now, let's assume what happened on El Toro the other day was a similar incident to what happened on Son of Beast in 2007. Does this mean all of the rides at Kings Island (or heck, at all Cedar Fair parks) were unsafe in 2007?

super7*:

Properly maintained rides don’t fall apart

Not quite. Properly maintained rides fail much (much) less often. But, no one can predict every possible failure, let alone prevent it. Some are easier to predict/prevent than others, and proper maintenance reduces the chances--and probably by orders of magnitude.

But, zero never happens.

Don’t forget that the park had a log flume boat “de-flume” because a rusted guard rail basically fell off. At some point you do have to wonder about that place, whether it’s warranted or just a series of unfortunate accidents.

Its sad that my first reaction to this was along the lines of, "well, there was another significant failure on an Intamin ride", almost like it was inevitable that something would happen on one of their rides this season.

This is just pure speculation, but I wonder if this failure is some how related to the repairs they did after the derailment. Didn't they have to replace a significant portion of the track on the ride? I wonder if there was some installation error, or manufacturing defect in what was repaired.

They should go ahead and RMC it but not change the layout /at all/.

Save the continued headache now.

Wishful thinking... You know it can't be a proper RMC without 5 barrel rolls scattered throughout!

A ride op spoke anonymously to CBS New York about the issues with the ride.

"From what I know, maintenance has know about it and they have tried fixing it. But for how it is, it just keeps happening," the employee said. "The employees keep telling them that there is an issue with the pothole and maintenance has done nothing about it."

Not a good look for the park.

El Torro Ryans “Problematic” series on youtube (long but pretty good watches if you are really into engineering details )stated that a replacement prefabricated piece from Intamin cost more than $50K on average. The pieces look maybe 20-30 feet long and it’s 1 side only, so that adds up in a hurry. SFGAdv decided that would cost too much and instead they try and replicate their prefab process in house. He suggested a good chuck of the ride now is house prefab sections.

We don’t know what happened here for sure, so tough to tell if this is causing the ongoing issues. Perhaps the inhouse prefab still provides a smooth ride for the most part, but has durability and strength issues. Prefab replacement sections might be more an offseason thing and in season maintenance is more patchwork, and maybe they were hoping to get through the year (or maybe weekly operations) to do a full replacement of that pothole area.

Outside speculation, if the area in question was indeed prefab pieces done in house, I wonder what if any extra-legal scrutiny this will be under. Trying to replicate a manufacture’s process and track sections is a little different than maintaining and replacing worn out sections on a traditional wood coaster. I'm guessing the process is not signed off on by Intamin in anyway either.

I'm not sure Intamin sign-off on safety is a particularly high bar given its history.

Joe E.:

a good chuck of the ride

^^ Ride ops don't know ****, but agreed it's a bad look for the park when they say stuff like that to the media. I'd guess that that person is no longer a ride op.

I'm not 100% how the Intamin prefab works, and how it's put together. There is a difference between in-house and not OEM... if they have the specs for the piece, the park could certainly contract that to someone to make it the same as Intamin would without the manufacturer's markup, and possibly with a shorter lead time. As long as it's made to the same quality there's nothing wrong with that. You're not obligated to buy spare parts from a manufacturer on a 15 year old ride.

I wouldn’t necessarily say ride ops know all the s, but they have to know some. They’re the ones who ride it every day and they do so to look for anything out of order. They know their downtime. They know when maintenance has been around and why. They see every single guest that rides their ride and can observe them and listen to any reaction.
Which is at least a lot more than the Lemon Chill guy knows, and it may even be more than guests who witness or are involved in an incident.

Out of curiosity, what is the state inspection like in New Jersey for amusement parks? I know it's all over the map in other states, but I would suspect NJ might be more strict than some other states (which then surprises me a bit about the park being able to fabricate track in house...)

I've heard NJ is very strict, to the point of absurdity in some cases. That was many years ago though. And the source probably wasn't great.

This incident and conversation reminded me of this video. I enjoyed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yFYR74fgoU

Colossos was 15 years old when renovations started in 2016. The cost was 12.5M Euros.

Looks like Toro may need some serious TLC.