Firefighters were called to help evacuate guests stranded in elevators in the Transformers and Men in Black Alien Attack buildings. (Spoiler alert: The ride vehicles on Transformers go in an elevator shaft at two points in that attraction.) Everyone got out safely and power now has been restored to the park.
The Simpsons Ride and Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts remained in operation throughout the morning, according to an Orlando Sentinel report. But the outage affected operations throughout pretty much the rest of the park. (Islands of Adventure and the rest of the resort were not affected.) Universal Orlando spokesperson Tom Schroder told the Sentinel that the problem was internal to Universal. No injuries or other serious incidents were reported.
Power outages in theme parks not directly related to weather are rare, but not unheard of. (I remember a couple when I worked at Walt Disney World.) Were you at Universal this morning? Have you ever been caught in a park without power? Tell us your stories in the comments.
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The first was a couple years ago on The Great Movie Ride. Our vehicle literally stopped 3 times at 3 scenes in a row. First the Raiders of the Lost Ark scene, then the Tarzan scene, then the Casablanca scene. In total, we must have been stuck for at least an hour. The upside: my family sat in the front row, so we had a pretty nice conversation with our tour guide. At one point she even let me and my sister perform our own rendition of Small World for everyone else on the vehicle. The downside: even though the ride vehicles stopped working, the animatronics didn't. Humphrey Boggart's final farewell to his girlfriend at the end of Casablanca is now perminately engraved into my brain. And Tarzan. Holy crap, Tarzan. At all 3 places where we stopped we were within perfect hearing range of Tarzan's iconic yell. And it got old pretty quickly. If I had to hear that scream one more time, I probably would've gone on a psychotic rampage. Thankfully, they were able to fix it and we were able to finish the ride, but man was I happy to be back in broad daylight.
The second instance actually happened last year. This time on the Rip Ride Rockit. When we reached the brake run right before the little grassy area that passes right by CityWalk, the ride suddenly stopped. I looked around me, and all the other coaster trains seemed to be stopped, too. Again, we must have been stuck for about an hour (probably a little less) and the sun was really beating down on us. I think something also might have been wrong with the safety restraint on the kid right in front of me; he was screaming in pain the whole time and his dad kept trying to get it off of him. He was begging for my help, but he could only speak in some foreign language I couldn't understand and I really couldn't really do much from where I was. I was relieved to finally see some ride attendants letting off the people on the coaster trains below us, who worked their way up to where we were. They let us off, attended to the little kid, took us down a flight of stairs (thank god we stopped at a brake run) and gave us all fresh (and cold) bottles of water.
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