It is the end of an era at West Edmonton Mall.
I was hoping to let my son ride it, as he is interested in rides, and is at the height he’s allowed to go on rides like this.
I remember back in 1986, when that rollercoaster flung 4 people out at 100km an hour to the floor below… Not a great day.
A friend and I rode it once or twice month around the time of the accident - it could have been us. After the accident we referred to it as the “(mostly) death-defying roller-coaster”
It was a great ride, all wrapped-up inside the building and claustrophobic. It had, for some odd reason, circular loops rather than tear-dropped which made the speed and g-forces insane.
I rode it once, on a visit to Edmonton for a ChampCar race. After I rode it, I was told about the old accident. I’m glad I didn’t know before I went for a spin.
I worked at West Edmonton Mall in the dolphin center at the time, building computer hardware and software to enable us to ‘talk’ to the dolphins. We had a free pass to all the attractions in the mall, and probably rode that roller coaster a hundred times.
The night of the accident we were in line for the coaster when one of our group said they’d rather go see a movie. So we left the line and went to see the movie. When we came out, the accident had already happened at some point.
We all wondered if we had not made the choice to go to a movie, would we have been on that coaster? The odds say probably not, but the next thing was, did we change who was killed? Leaving the line moved people up four spots. If the people who died were behind us in that line, the little choice we made changed the lives of 8 people. Four people lived who wouldn’t have, and four others died who would be alive today. I still think about that from time to time.
The butterfly effect means similar things happen all the time as you interact with the world, just at distances more removed. For example, imagine you take an extra minute to get ready one day before you get in your car to drive someplace. You’ll affect traffic patterns slightly, and somebody else will or won’t just barely beat a red light because you were or weren’t right there at that particular moment. This effect cascades and somebody different might end up killed in a traffic accident that day. The only real difference is you won’t ever know the causal links.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. But as you say, this weird situation made it a little more clear what the effect of our decision was. A real life example of the major consequences that can accrue from small decisions.
Anyway, that coaster was a lot of fun to ride. Because it was relatively small compared to the giant coasters, it made up for it in g forces and constant acceleration of some kind. You were always in a curve, or a loop, or something.
Ahhhhh, the forerunner to the Euthanasia Coaster.
Sounds like the plot of a movie … Final Destination (2000) - IMDb
Never seen it.