Hero Crowd Catches Girl Who Fell From a Ride at Six Flags
A 14-year-old girl was lucky to avoid serious injury this weekend when she fell from a ride at a Six Flags amusement park, and a crowd of other parkgoers caught her and broke her fall.
It’s not clear how the unnamed teenager fell out of the ride. According to CNN, the girl is from Delaware and she was at The Great Escape & Splashwater Kingdom in Queensbury, in upstate New York, on Saturday when somehow she fell from an attraction called the Sky Ride. It’s basically a gondola that moves very slowly around the park so people can look down, and on the Six Flags website it is listed as a family ride with no minimum height requirement.. Somehow, the 14-year-old wound up dangling from the ride and screaming, but nobody knows how exactly that happened yet.
The ride has been shut down, but the sheriff and park authorities say it appears to be in normal working order, and all its safety equipment was intact and operational.
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Still, in spite of all that safety equipment, passersby heard the girl screaming and saw her dangling from the carriage by her hands and her head.
She was riding with her younger brother when the accident happened.
When they saw her hanging from the ride and screaming, several brave park visitors ran under the ride to try to catch her. And they did! The girl fell 25 feet and hit a tree branch on the way down, but she did not sustain any serious injuries. She was taken to the hospital afterwards, but any injuries from the fall were minor.
The man who caught her, a 47-year-old man from New Jersey who caught the girl with the help of his daughter, was reportedly knocked out by the impact, and he was treated for a back injury afterwards, but he’s been released from the hospital and is reportedly OK.
“I have 11 kids,” he said to WNYT News. “All I was thinking about was what if that was one of mine.”
An inspection showed that the ride was in order and should have been safe, but the park says the ride will remain closed until a new safety review is completed and they figure out how exactly this happened so they can prevent it from happening again.
(Image: Six Flags)
