Serious accident on Xcelerator caputerd on Video

Intamin's president after a fellow buzzer? Double wow!

DanLinden:
The haul ropes on the rocket coasters ARE effectively completely shrouded from the ride. Only the return rope (attached to the back of the launch sled, and used to return the sled to the starting position) runs in the open, and it should be subject to comparatively little force during a launch. Obviously there is a gap in the rope shroud to allow the rope to attach to the launch sled. I do not know if the gap is large enough for the rope to pass through. I do know that when you sit in the front seat on Dragster, you cannot see either of the haul ropes.

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I was under the impression that the massive failure on Kingda Ka did NOT involve a failure of the haul rope...instead it was a failure of the launch sled track, and may have involved an attempt to launch while the brakes were up. The only other incident similar to the one on Xcelerator would be the one on Dragster where a haul rope failed and created a similar debris cloud

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I wonder if the shrapnel is in fact the result of the broken end of the haul rope abrading against the slot in the launch track. But then, if that's the case, why is all the debris concentrated on one location rather than all along the launch track from the point of failure?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

At first glance of his two posts in this thread, the first one appears like it may be possible to go after for libel/defamation, but after some more serious consideration, I don't find the likelihood very high. The second post isn't even close. I agree with Jeff, not much sense in pursuing it.

Dave: The debris cloud was towards the end of the launch where the cable heads into the motor house, leaving the safety of its track housing, correct? If the point of failure for the cable was close to that area, the debris may have concentrated there, or if the enclosure isn't particularly heavy, the force of the snapping cable may have caused the enclosure to fail. Of course, that's just my uneducated thought simply from looking at pictures and of watching TTD a lot.

IntaminHater said:

I am with Carrie on this one it has to be a major incident. I don't care that the injuries are minor, when you have a catastrophic failure, as this ride did, to me it is major no matter what the outcome.

I don't agree at all that this is a major incident. I'm not a mechanical engineer but I do enjoy looking at machinery. In looking at Dragster at Cedar Point it is pretty obvious that a cable break is a failure mode that has been designed for and precautions were taken.

Not only are the haul ropes encased in the track but the return rope bullwheel as a low tension switch on it which is there presumably to shut the ride down if the bullwheel goes back far enough due to a failed or stretched cable. That tells me that the engineers took steps to protect the riders and the machinery from rope failure and the fact that injuries are minor means the precautions are working. You can't call something a "catastrophic failure" if the failure mode is designed into the safety systems of the ride.

Pete said:
That tells me that the engineers took steps to protect the riders and the machinery from rope failure and the fact that injuries are minor means the precautions are working. You can't call something a "catastrophic failure" if the failure mode is designed into the safety systems of the ride.

Yes! Exactly.

So riders zooming through clouds of debris twice, then (apparently and allegedly) running over their own cable on the rollback is considered a safety system that's doing what it's designed to do? If that's the case, I sure wouldn't want to be on the Rocket that really failed....

I think what they're trying to say is if it were designed differently it could have been much worse.

Ensign Smith said:
So riders zooming through clouds of debris twice, then (apparently and allegedly) running over their own cable on the rollback is considered a safety system that's doing what it's designed to do?

Yes, not kill you.

If that's the case, I sure wouldn't want to be on the Rocket that really failed....

Exactly.

Anybody got a ready made KBF park for RCT3? Now I have the hankering to design Gonch's death coaster that sails you over LaPalma Avenue.

Very crazy incident to say the least. I hadn't been paying much attention to coaster news until several days after and have enjoyed reading through this thread.

The real kicker for me is the way the seat moved. I wonder, though, if it was the result of something in the design to avoid an impact injury. I remember watching this program on airplane crashes and how people were killed in relatively minor crashes because the seats came loose. To fix the problem, the aircraft designers gave the seats a sort of "give." I wonder if Xcelerator's seats feature anything similar in case of a sudden stop?

I kind of doubt it, as you don't expect a coaster train to crash into anything solid, but you never know. Most important is that the riders were OK and that the problem can be diagnosed and fixed so it won't happen again. I trust Intamin/Cedar Fair, etc. will do this.

I just don't understand when the average person will understand that rollercoaster’s are mechanical devices and there are inherent risks when you choose to use or ride mechanical devices. I am glad that the individuals in the video only suffered minor injuries as it could have been worse. I just think some people are quite naive when they watch a ride like Xcelerator operate and don't understand the potential risks associated with ridding this massively complicated mechanical device. Probability and Statistics tells us that these accidents will happen so why is everyone so outraged when they do.

I'm sure more people die operating a chain saw in their backyard every year than do at a theme park yet the story may not even make the news. The same probably goes for snow blowers and lawn mowers. I bet more injuries are reported on escalators and elevators of greater severity at malls as well. I just don't understand the lure of theme park accident as a huge story for media outlets.

Like any other engineering accident in history this event will be studied and improvements will be made to prevent or decrease the chances of such an accident in the future. Will this be the last mechanical failure resulting in an accident on Xcelerator, probably not.

I got this photo of a slide showing injury statistics at a presentation during Coaster Con 2006 in Orlando. Seems to be relevant here.

http://www.rollercoasterfreak.com/Coaster_Con_XXIX/IMGP5850.jpg

I hate when Shuffleboard games turn deadly.

Be careful using accident rate data, doubly careful using CPSC NEISS data, because the bottom line is that for amusement rides you are dealing with vehicles which travel a very short distance per trip, but carry millions of trips without incident.

I think on the average there is something like three deaths per year on amusement rides. That is a raw number but it doesn't express the likelihood of dying on an amusement ride, nor does it measure that risk against other activities, which is why we get incident rates like "per million activity hours" or "per million passenger miles". The tricky bit is that it is so easy to cook the data and get the result you want. If, for instance, you compare roller coasters to other transportation methods, roller coasters have higher injury rates per million passenger miles than commercial aircraft, and in fact have a worse record than anything else on the list. But if you go by number of trips between accidents, roller coasters are safer than anything else on the list.

That doesn't make the data any less valid. But it demonstrates the importance of understanding the data that you are looking at.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Now being a law major and going back to reading his first post, I was really interested. I don't think Intamin would ever take him to court over this because of what was already stated however they probably would have a fair case against him. The comments aren't too over the top, but the deal breaker that makes this case different is his screen name. That screen name makes it look much less of a person skepctical of an accident and much more of a person who has a vendetta with the company. Now because he's shown previous dislike for the company with his screen name, these comments are able to be taken in a different context.

Pete said:

IntaminHater said:

I am with Carrie on this one it has to be a major incident. I don't care that the injuries are minor, when you have a catastrophic failure, as this ride did, to me it is major no matter what the outcome.

I don't agree at all that this is a major incident. ....

You can't call something a "catastrophic failure" if the failure mode is designed into the safety systems of the ride.

How did we make the jump from major incident to catastrophic failure? I wouldn't consider those two things to be synonymous.

It really comes down to your own perception of major/minor. To me, minor is the restraints getting stuck in the locked/open position while the train is in the station.

A malfunction that occurs when the ride is in motion that causes injury to the riders is major to me, even more so at 80 mph.

Seems to me that the label you put on the accident (major/minor/catastrophic/whatever) doesn't really matter. The accident is what it is. What is important is looking at exactly what happened (and that will require looking at the ride itself, the train, any pictures/videos of the accident (including the one we have seen on youtube), inspection reports and any other info thats available) and determining what can be done to reduce the risk of it happening again or lessening the damage done if it does happen again.

Andr3 said:

I know that on Top Thrill Dragster, an E-Stop at launch, which this apparently was, will cause the ride to stop as soon as possible. That's what happened.

Sorry to go back here, but I was talking about the way the train stopped. The brakes were obviously up and slowed the train down after the rollback, but the train jolts to a stop. The magnetic brakes on Intamin coasters can only slow the train way down until the tires act as a skid brake to bring the train to a complete stop. I'm still trying to figure out why the train jammed to a stop rather than crawled to it.

GoBucks89 said:
The accident is what it is...looking at exactly what happened (and that will require looking at the ride itself, the train, any pictures/videos of the accident (including the one we have seen on youtube), inspection reports and any other info thats available) and determining what can be done to reduce the risk of it happening again or lessening the damage done if it does happen again.

Pretty much exactly what I say on this week's podcast.

Parks should just build more B&M coasters to lessen the rick of Intamin death machines haha. The accidents do add another dimension to the ride though. You don't know what's going to happen.

Really though accidents like this are so few and far between it's not really a huge earth shattering event. It's the same thing with people and flying. They see one plane crash and think flying is the most dangerous thing ever, but they continue to drive which has a much higher rate of death. Hopefully the ramifications of this accident don't result in something like having OTSR on everything.