After five hours, all passengers rescued from Six Flags roller coaster

The 24 people stranded on a roller coaster at Six Flags America Maryland were safely rescued Sunday.

|
(AP Photo/Prince George's County Fire Dept., Marc Bashoor)
Firefighters reaching riders stranded on a roller coaster at Six Flags America in Upper Marlboro, Md., Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014.

Authorities say 24 people stranded on a roller coaster have been rescued from near the top of the ride at Six Flags America in Maryland.

Prince George's County Fire officials say it took about five hours Sunday to rescue 17 adults and seven children from The Joker's Jinx roller coaster.

Assistant Fire Chief Paul Gomez says the riders were sitting upright. A few had cramps, back pain and dehydration, but there were no major injuries.

A Six Flags America spokesman said in a statement that it is not yet clear what caused the ride to stop but that it has a computerized safety system that "performed as it is designed to."

Six Flags' website says the ride goes 60 miles per hour and upside down four times.

Last week, at Six Flags Great Adventure & Safari in Jackson, N.J., passengers on the Nitro roller coaster found themselves stuck part way up the first 233-foot high hill of the ride. Six Flags park officials say a power outage to the ride was to blame. No one was injured as a result of the stoppage.  Ride operators climbed up, helped the passengers out of their seats, and down the stairs, NBC News reported.

Last month, the front car of the Ninja coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, Calif., became dislodged after colliding with a branch lying atop the tracks shortly. It took rescue crews three hours to evacuate the 22 riders, one at a time, from the coaster. No one was seriously injured.

But as The Christian Science Monitor reported, the safety record for amusement park rides is improving.

Accidents at southern California amusement parks are relatively rare, a 2013 Los Angeles Times investigation of theme parks found.

The Times staff combed through more than 2,000 accident reports filed at 57 area parks between 2007 and 2012. Nearly one-fifth of those reports related to motion sickness. About 350 injuries occurred each year during the six-year period covered in the investigation. That’s a relatively small number compared with the total combined attendance of 40 million visitors each year.

Nationally, the number of injuries per million attendees has been steadily dropping since 2001, according to a survey of fixed-site ride injuries across the United States between 2001 and 2011, conducted by the National Safety Council's Research & Statistical Services Group in Itasca, Ill. The survey found that in 2011, about 4.3 people per million park visitors received injuries, compared with an average of 8.2 per million visitors in 2001.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to After five hours, all passengers rescued from Six Flags roller coaster
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0810/After-five-hours-all-passengers-rescued-from-Six-Flags-roller-coaster
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe