It’s been a rough few weeks for slides. The fun feature doesn’t always get a bad wrap but when injuries are appearing left and right, something has to be up.
A huge slide in Detroit’s Belle Isle Park was forced to close just hours after opening for the day because people were being thrown into the air and falling awkwardly back onto the slide. The speed was just too much for most people to handle.
An eyewitness described people heading down the historic Giant Slide as getting thrown into the air with reckless abandon. “What I noticed was the impact they were hitting the ground with coming off the hills. If they would have kept riding on that slide, somebody would have got hurt,” onlooker Kenyatta McAdney said.
One child added: “I was going down way faster than I thought I was. Gravity hurts.” Gravity will do that to you. The ride was shuttered after just four hours so the wax could be retouched.
The slide gained viral traction online when a video of the ride was posted on Twitter. People got a kick out of seeing riders tossed down the ride like a salad. One user quoted the tweet and wrote: “Break-Back Mountain.”
Another commented: “As someone who frequently went to the I-X Indoor Amusement Park in the ’90s, trust and believe you can lose teeth on a slide like this.”
A statement was released from Joel Thomas, Belle Isle supervisor for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. It read: “Hopefully, after our small adjustment we will be back up and running and the slide will be slower for more enjoyment.
“For this evening, we’re giving it a little scrub down, and we will be back open at 11 tomorrow.”
Luckily, the ride was reopened and so far, there have been no other issues.
Source: https://twitter.com/artcombatpod/status/1560750215946199041