One of the nation's top roller coasters might be down for a while, following multiple reports of what appears to be a significant crack on one of its supports.
Pictures and video posted to social media show the crack, which appears to have developed this afternoon on Fury 325. The 2015 Bolliger & Mabillard Hyper is ranked number five on Theme Park Insider's list of top 25 roller coasters. It runs at a top speed of 95 mph on 6,602 feet of track, with that advertised height of 325 feet.
But no one wants to run on a coaster that does what this video showed happening to Fury 325's track this afternoon. You can see photos of the crack via the Carowinds Annual Passholders group on Facebook.
Multiple Theme Park Insider readers reported that the park closed the coaster immediately after the crack flex and that it remained down the rest of the day. No injuries were reported. There have been no official updates yet from the park.
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Yikes. I would not be surprised if all B&M hypers get a serious inspection now.
Of all the failures I can recall on amusement rides, I don't think I've ever seen one quite like this. As such, I spent far too much time yesterday discussing this one with fellow enthusiasts and engineers, and the consensus from the current evidence seems to be that it was likely a hairline crack in the weld that propagated until it became a full break. The root cause is very much a question, but may not be anything out of the ordinary as small cracks that require rewelding aren't all that uncommon on roller coasters. The more concerning thing, however, is that pictures taken at ACE's Coaster Con event last week appear to show the start of the crack developing, which means either maintenance somehow didn't notice it during their inspections, didn't perform a thorough inspection for over a week, or simply decided it wasn't a pressing concern. I doubt we'll ever know the full story, but fortunately this didn't result in any injuries and seems to be an isolated Fury/Carowinds issue rather than a larger issue with B&Ms in general.
Go check out ParkFans, they’ve got the best, most knowledgeable take on this. Should help stop baseless misinformation from any commenters here
There's as much speculation on parkfans as there is on any of the sites. The video is damming evidence of a major structural failure, but to find its root cause will take time. It's ok to talk about a hairline crack in the weld being the culprit, but if that proves to be the case, then what caused the weld to crack in the first place?.
My background is mechanical and not structural, but I've had welds fail on stressed parts, and we'd take weeks of thorough investigations before we replaced any parts.
Fury is way more complex than anything I ever designed, so from my experience with stress failures, I'd have to say I don't see it running again until the start of the 2024 season. I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see.
It's not unheard of for a coaster to be ripping itself apart and require major modifications, it was pretty much an expectation of Intamin coasters in the 2000's. Here are a few examples:
original
https://rcdb.com/631.htm#p=8207
modified
https://rcdb.com/631.htm#p=118838
original
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/unofficialcedarpoint/images/5/5d/Wicked_Twister.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110901003128
modified
https://media.wkyc.com/assets/WKYC/images/bd13c8de-5f0e-4510-9148-d7d38c3afeb8/bd13c8de-5f0e-4510-9148-d7d38c3afeb8_1920x1080.jpg
original
https://www.americacoasters.com/Photos/thumbs/lrg-2072-11.jpg
modified
https://images.coasterpedia.net/thumb/2/24/250px-Xcelerator-Launch.jpg/1000px-250px-Xcelerator-Launch.jpg
I can't find a pic of it from 1988, but here are some pictures made post modification. You can see the top half of the loops have mods because the structure was ripping itself apart
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NsZr8VC4Tps/maxresdefault.jpg
https://coasterbuzz.com/CoasterPhoto/CoasterPhotoImage/228
That being said yea its really bad that it got that far and they got lucky to not have a major accident. Would be interesting to be a fly on the wall of their maintenance dept to see if they knew this section of the ride had stress issues or not.
Actually, watching that video I'm not sure why the support strut on the diagonal is on that side of the post. Maybe due to footprint issues and maybe it was sized to overcome that stress.
Clearly the ride goes around the bend where this post is at the apex, and in doing so it's 'pushing' on this joint. That means the support strut is lax/at rest and then all of a sudden in massive tension when the ride goes by. So I wonder why the strut isn't on the other side 'pushing' against that flex, for which steel should have a much better response to compression vs being stretched which is subject to repeat stress failure.
At a minimum, not only will this have to be fixed, but now every single bolt, piece of track, etc. in the area will also have to be checked extensively as all of that flex has put all the bolts and track butt ends now in repeat tension stress as well.
This is frightening. Some of my coaster enthusiast friends were at ACE's Coaster Con at Carowinds and rode the hell out of Fury. While I couldn't see any evidence of the crack in any of the photos they posted, it was obviously in the process of developing into a potentially deadly structural failure.
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“Is this the five o’clock free crack giveaway?”