Reports have been calling it “a crack”. That’s not a crack - that’s a complete failure of one of the largest support members. Holy Cow! Imagine the force needed to shear that column.
Because of many recent threads around here, I mis-read this as ‘Roller Coaster closed for fudge failure’
I rode that coaster multiple times just over a week ago, along with a lot of my coaster club friends, as part of our annual coaster convention.
While that is one heck of a crack I wouldn’t call it a failure. That, to my mind, would be an actual collapse of the supporting member and subsequent failure of the rest of the coaster. That has actually been prevented by the closing.
I mean, thank Og no one got hurt.
Here’s a non-Fox cite for folks who block Fox and all their works:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/01/us/north-carolina-roller-coaster-closed/index.html
It almost certainly wasn’t sheared in one whack. Precisely because that would take, as you suggest, enormous force.
But a crack can start from a defect in a weld or the material, or from corrosion, and then propagate extensively while the member is exposed only to ordinary forces that ought to be well within its design load plus margins.
Of course cracking is an exponential process. As the crack propagates, there’s ever less solid material available to transmit the ordinary loads. So the growth rate accelerates over time. Eventually the member strength gets down into the range of normal loadings for static weight plus dynamic elements like wind, temp, and coaster load and motion. Then it snaps clean through.
It’s a complete failure of that particular structure. Period. It no longer even contacts the track. You could unbolt it from its mounting pads and throw it aside and have no greater impact. However. Fortuitously. The structure is redundant enough that the failure of one support does not instantly compromise the entire ride. Although I’m sure the unsupported section oscillated in use.
My understanding is that OceanGate was the contractor.
The article said that after being notified, the park “temporarily closed down the ride”. Temporarily?!? That does not look like a quick fix.
Their last project certainly contracted.
It shouldn’t be a difficult repair. Replace the steel beam and reinforce with a gusset in the corner.
Glad they saw the crack before it got any worse until catastrophic failure.
So, the structure is “inspected daily” but it took a customer to point it out….
IANA structural engineer, but IMO that crack did not go from zero to what we see in the pix in one day. There was a crack to be seen from at least some angles for quite awhile; weeks certainly, months probably.
I came here to say the same thing.
Need a lot of duct tape for that one …
“Looks OK from down here, Boss.”
You’re just being silly. They will use Super Glue for that. Probably a whole tube.
I was at this park (Carowinds) 2 months ago on a school trip. My kids and many other kids rode this thing.
When we visited that day, 50% of the time spent waiting in line for rides was due to “unexpected maintenance issues.” And we’re talking like 40 minutes extra wait. And it wasn’t just the one in the article (Fury, though it was the longest delay) but pretty much every major ride.
Seems like Carowinds doesn’t much care about the reliability of their attractions, and at some point I’m afraid some kids (or a whole band class) is going to get seriously injured there.
Yeah, the fact that all rides are inspected daily makes me less confident about the safety of that park, not more. If their inspections can miss something that blatant, then they’re basically not doing any inspection at all. If they had instead said that inspections were conducted yearly, or something, I might at least assume that the crack developed since the last inspection, but that that inspection was actually thorough.
Every superglue repair requires a whole tube. Because no matter how much of the tube you use, by the time you get to the next project, that tube is unusable.
I worry about the carnival rides. Some date back 40 or more years They’re taken apart and reassembled in a new town every week.
It’s surprising there aren’t more accidents.
I assume the daily inspection is by park staff. I’ve had to do similar work in the past, and it’s very easy to get complacent when you’re looking at the same thing every day, so I can see how it was missed. Also, I wonder what the daily inspection entails, given how high the crack appeared.
And in addition to the daily in-house inspection, I think these parks are regularly (monthly? quarterly?) visited by state inspectors.