Yesterday the news featured a story about how Disney’s Animal Kingdom will be making some changes to the Primeval Whirl roller coaster that might prevent any future serious injury or deaths resulting from cast members being in off-limits places while the attraction is in motion.
It’s a two part fix. They’ll be making changes to the load/unloading platform in length and safety markings. But they’ll also be adding sensor pads to the ‘off-limits’ areas that will automatically “e-stop” the attraction should someone step on the pad.
I haven’t been on many Disney attractions recently, but those ‘sensor pads’ seem to be appearing all over the place. At the Magic Kingdom I noticed Splash Mountain, Haunted Mansion, and Snow White all have them now. I’m sure there are more attractions I just didn’t ride. So it doesn’t surprise me that Disney has added them over at DAK too.
In the some of the dark rides, by which I mean darkly lit, it’s okay because you’re not really looking at the floor; but in Snow White and Splash Mountain it is fairly obvious when you see them and it does throw the theming off a bit. An observant guest can just avoid stepping on the pad since they’re pretty obvious.
I know they have the technology to build these sorts of sensors into the floor since it’s in use at at least one attraction at Disneyland. Plus they also have ‘infrared beams’ that also e-stop the attraction in use at various attractions (Spaceship Earth comes to mind). So I wonder why they’ve switched to these very obvious pads.
I am not sure if this is due to sensors but I know about a few mishaps that happened on rides. Nothing serious but .. One time We were stuck on prime evil whirl at the very top, and had to walk all the way down on a cat walk down to the exit ramp. We were a little glad because we were killing time before the Nemo show and we didn’t really want to go see it at that time. My friend lost his hat and sunglasses on that ride……we did get ’em back a month later….Disney’s pretty good about that. Another time I got stuck on Buzz with a high score of 678,200 or something like that and the lights came on and the power of the vehicles came off. I lost that score. That was my best score too!
Then, my friends and I got stuck on Splash Mountain where the vultures are. The lights came on and the audio KEPT playing!! We were stuck for about 15-20 minutes.
Then we went on Pirates and got stuck where you see the drunk pirate on the right and keeps saying “Here kitty kitty” OVER AND OVER AGAIN!!!!!! We were stuck there for about a half hour that time. “Here kitty kitty” ;-)
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