By JAMES PRICHARD
The Associated Press
DALTON TOWNSHIP - The maker of a spinning ride at Michigan’s Adventure Amusement Park that crashed to the ground with 33 people aboard said Tuesday it was the first such problem with the Chaos ride.
Meanwhile, it probably will be at least today before officials can make even a preliminary determination as to the cause of Monday’s accident, said Steve Mark, vice president of construction and maintenance at the western Michigan amusement park.
The accident sent 31 riders to hospitals for treatment or examination. All but two had been released by Tuesday afternoon.
James Burtchett, 41, and his son Ryan, 13, both of Bridgman, were being treated for cuts to their ears at Spectrum Health Butterworth Campus, said Debbie Mayse, a spokeswoman for the Grand Rapids hospital.
The Burtchetts spent nearly five hours pinned upside-down in their car at the bottom of the ride.
James Burtchett said the screams he heard were the first indication that something had gone horribly wrong.
“I looked down and saw that the chairs we were riding in, some of them were hitting some beams and breaking up, and fiberglass was going all over,” he told The Muskegon Chronicle for a story Tuesday. “When it came to rest, we were in the two (chairs) that were on the bottom. The whole wheel was on top of us.”
The father was expected to be released sometime Tuesday and the boy was expected to go home today, Mayse said.
Before Monday’s accident, the state had recorded 23 injuries at carnivals and amusement parks this year. For all of 2000, there were 47 injuries, according to the Michigan Department of Consumer and Industry Services.
But injury accidents at amusement parks are not that common, according to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, a trade organization based in Alexandria, Va.
Amusement parks in the United States hosted more than 300 million guests who took more than 3 billion rides in 1999. Based on those figures and the federal government’s latest statistics, the likelihood of being injured in a ride seriously enough to require hospitalization is about 1 in 22 million and the chance of being fatally injured is 1 in 1.5 billion.
During the 1990s, there were 21 rider deaths at amusement parks nationwide and seven at fairs and carnivals. Blame for the accidents has fallen on riders, ride operators and mechanical failure.
No blame has been placed yet for the accident at Michigan’s Adventure Amusement Park, about 10 miles north of Muskegon.
“We don’t take things like this lightheartedly,” said Martin Steffens, general manager of Chance. “We are unable to ascertain what’s happened yet.”
The ride is also found at two other Cedar Fair amusement parks: Cedar Point in Sandusky and Valley Fair in Minnesota. The company closed those rides within 30 minutes of Monday’s accident and won’t reopen them until a cause has been determined and any necessary safety modifications have been made, said Camille Jourden-Mark, vice president of park operations at Michigan’s Adventure.
In a news release, Chance said the ride design has been in use since 1996. Fifty-two units have been produced and are operating around the world.
The wheel-shaped ride has 18 two-passenger cars. It starts out rotating horizontally, then slowly begins tilting on one side until it is spinning at a sharp angle with the ground.
Officials said it appeared the ride sheared off its spindle as it started to tilt upward about 6:30 p.m. Monday. The ride came to rest in a nearly vertical position, with some riders hanging sideways in the two-passenger baskets.
Seven cars hit the pavement, Jourden-Mark said. Rescuers in cranes and cherry-pickers had to wait nearly three hours before they could extract people stuck toward the top of the ride because they had to ensure the ride was stabilized.
“Nothing like this has ever occurred here, ever,” she said Tuesday.
