What's new
By:
FORUMS - COASTERFORCE

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Six Flags Over Georgia Goliath Incident (12-Oct-2026)

Yes, it’s really fun to speculate about which park received which memo and when.

EP opens SS as normal without seat belts on October 13.
The same goes for Steel Dragon 2000, although I don’t know whether it has seat belts.
Hershey opens Candymonium as normal with seat belts on October 16.
That same day, Hollywood Dreams also reopens without seat belts after being closed.
SeaWorld keeps Marco closed without seat belts, but then opens it on October 20.
And as far as I can tell from my research, Apollo’s Chariot is still closed, even though its park is part of the same chain as SeaWorld.
I also don’t know whether the coaster at Happy Valley was open or whether it has seat belts.
 
dontbesuchamcbr said:
Yes, it’s really fun to speculate about which park received which memo and when.

EP opens SS as normal without seat belts on October 13.
The same goes for Steel Dragon 2000, although I don’t know whether it has seat belts.
Hershey opens Candymonium as normal with seat belts on October 16.
That same day, Hollywood Dreams also reopens without seat belts after being closed.
SeaWorld keeps Marco closed without seat belts, but then opens it on October 20.
And as far as I can tell from my research, Apollo’s Chariot is still closed, even though its park is part of the same chain as SeaWorld.
I also don’t know whether the coaster at Happy Valley was open or whether it has seat belts.
Click to expand...
This presumes B&M issued any guidance at all.

Given that parks are reopening their rides, or never closed them in the first place, it’s likely B&M never sent an official communiqué to operators and is treating SFOG’s Goliath as an isolated incident. From a liability standpoint, that’s probably the right call. It avoids presuming B&M (or “the manufacturer,” as Tony Clark famously put it during TT2’s downtime with Zamperla) is the culprit, and it avoids creating undue concern that B&M’s broader portfolio is at risk. The coaster industry is also notoriously bad at keeping secrets. If a notice had gone out to all 17 parks operating B&M hypers worldwide, there’s a good chance it would have leaked.

Others in this thread speculated that B&M could have boots on the ground at SFOG the next day. That’s also unlikely, unless there were a clear sign of a manufacturing defect or something else within B&M’s control, as opposed to SFOG’s operator training, maintenance schedule, and so on.

To put it plainly: B&M is unlikely to be the immediate culprit for a malfunction on a 20-year-old roller coaster. Hyper coasters are B&M’s best-selling model, and with so many in operation worldwide, a single incident like Goliath’s is more reasonably treated as isolated than as evidence of a broader trend across their Hypers (or other coasters that share the same locking mechanism).
 
Matt N said:
Perhaps this is premature conjecture on my part, but if there was known to be any hint of a design flaw with the clamshells themselves contributing to the incident, I feel like Mako would not have reopened without seatbelts. This is a somewhat promising sign, in my view!
Click to expand...
This is what baffles me as all the evidence we have and statements by former mechanics and visitors suggests that the main cause likely was somekind of mechanical failure due to bad maintenance but that the B&M design itself is a contributing factor in that it demands maintenance to check the equipment 24/7 for it to be actually safe (basically re-position proxy sensors and remove outside dirt in the restraint mechanism after every run, exaggerated of course).
 
Hyde said:
Others in this thread speculated that B&M could have boots on the ground at SFOG the next day.
Click to expand...
A short insert from Werner Stengel's "Roller Coaster," regarding the Mindbender accident.

"That very same night the operators of Fantasyland notified Werner Stengel, who the following morning boarded a plane to Canada together with Anton Schwarzkopf. Barely had they landed when they were met by the police."
Click to expand...
 
This was probably inevitable, to be fair.

It’s a shame from a throughput standpoint (although the Cedar Fair giga coasters seem to do well enough throughputs-wise with seatbelts, so maybe not as much of a shame as I fear… can anybody provide any insight?), but I feel like Six Flags, being the main chain associated with the incident, was bound to have to be seen to be doing something and seatbelts are quite an easy and visible win for enhancing the perception of safety. And seeing as the legacy Cedar Fair parks already have seatbelts on their hypers, it would only be Nitro, Goliath at SFOG itself and Raging Bull getting altered, if I recall (Goliath at La Ronde is no longer in the Six Flags chain, is it not?).

I am always slightly sceptical of how much those car-style seatbelts on B&M Hypers would actually help in the event of a genuine restraint failure, but they are another layer of redundancy and quite a visible one for guests.

The fact that rides in Europe and Asia are open without seatbelts, as are Mako and potentially Apollo’s Chariot (?), leads me to believe that this is a Six Flags decision rather than a B&M-mandated decision, which is promising when it comes to the current theories about the safety and integrity of the clamshell design and whether or not it had a role in the incident.
 
Popular opinion incoming: there are over 100 deaths a day in America due to motor vehicle accidents, and nobody blinks an eye.

One death on a B&M hyper coaster after 20 years and 90 million riders, and everyone loses their minds.

The over-reaching correction culture, and inability to compartmentalize the almost infinitely safe track record of this ride compared to every day activities, is mind numbingly insane.
 
CaliAngel said:
Popular opinion incoming: there are over 100 deaths a day in America due to motor vehicle accidents, and nobody blinks an eye.

One death on a B&M hyper coaster after 20 years and 90 million riders, and everyone loses their minds.

The over-reaching correction culture, and inability to compartmentalize the almost infinitely safe track record of this ride compared to every day activities, is mind numbingly insane.
Click to expand...
That is always a popular analogy, but the difference between driving and riding roller coasters is that driving is an everyday essential activity frequently done out of necessity, whereas riding a roller coaster decidedly isn’t (unless you happen to work in a theme park).

Simply trotting out the good old stat of you having a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash versus a 1 in 1 billion (or whatever… I won’t profess to knowing the exact number) chance of dying on a roller coaster ignores the simple reality that a lot more drives occur across America on a daily basis than roller coaster rides. In the case of this post, there being over 100 deaths from car accidents across the USA per day is in large part due to the sheer number of drives undertaken across the USA almost certainly vastly outweighing the number of roller coaster rides. From having looked into this, as I was interested, the stat that “you have a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash” is typically calculated over a lifetime basis due to the sheer amount of times a person drives whereas the stats on discrete activities like roller coasters tend to be calculated on a per-instance basis due to roller coaster rides being far less frequent than car travel for the average person, so comparing the two oft-quoted odds is not necessarily the most reliable comparison. I’m not saying that the industry isn’t safe, as it is absolutely true even on a per-instance basis that driving to and from a park is much more likely to kill you than the park itself, but saying that there are over 100 car accident deaths a day and 1 B&M Hyper death in 27 years and equating the two figures ignores the fact that B&M Hyper rides occur at a vastly lesser rate than car travel, so it’s an imperfect comparison.

Also, one would argue that roller coasters should be far, far safer than driving. Driving is a mundane task that people do to facilitate independent living; people do it every day, they do it themselves to enable a fully independent life, and the level of risk is likely accepted by virtue of convenience and personal liberty. Whereas theme parks are a regulated industry that people participate in for leisure and a good time, so the risk tolerance should naturally be far lower. If the per-instance risk of dying on a roller coaster was anywhere even close to that of driving a car, I doubt it would have become such a popular leisure activity!
 
Matt N said:
That is always a popular analogy, but the difference between driving and riding roller coasters is that driving is an everyday essential activity frequently done out of necessity, whereas riding a roller coaster decidedly isn’t (unless you happen to work in a theme park).

Simply trotting out the good old stat of you having a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash versus a 1 in 1 billion (or whatever… I won’t profess to knowing the exact number) chance of dying on a roller coaster ignores the simple reality that a lot more drives occur across America on a daily basis than roller coaster rides. In the case of this post, there being over 100 deaths from car accidents across the USA per day is in large part due to the sheer number of drives undertaken across the USA almost certainly vastly outweighing the number of roller coaster rides. From having looked into this, as I was interested, the stat that “you have a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash” is typically calculated over a lifetime basis due to the sheer amount of times a person drives whereas the stats on discrete activities like roller coasters tend to be calculated on a per-instance basis due to roller coaster rides being far less frequent than car travel for the average person, so comparing the two oft-quoted odds is not necessarily the most reliable comparison. I’m not saying that the industry isn’t safe, as it is absolutely true even on a per-instance basis that driving to and from a park is much more likely to kill you than the park itself, but saying that there are over 100 car accident deaths a day and 1 B&M Hyper death in 27 years and equating the two figures ignores the fact that B&M Hyper rides occur at a vastly lesser rate than car travel, so it’s an imperfect comparison.

Also, one would argue that roller coasters should be far, far safer than driving. Driving is a mundane task that people do to facilitate independent living; people do it every day, they do it themselves to enable a fully independent life, and the level of risk is likely accepted by virtue of convenience and personal liberty. Whereas theme parks are a regulated industry that people participate in for leisure and a good time, so the risk tolerance should naturally be far lower. If the per-instance risk of dying on a roller coaster was anywhere even close to that of driving a car, I doubt it would have become such a popular leisure activity!
Click to expand...
ummmm that isnt how those statistics work.

The amount of people driving vs riding a coaster in one day is irrelevant . The statistic is that if exactly the same number of people rode a B&M hyper as drove cars or fly in a day (lets just say 1 billion for a random number) then you'd expect something like 1 person to die on the coaster, 10 to die on planes and 10'000 to die in road accidents. There is an argument that you spend 90 seconds on a coaster vs an hour in a car or 3 hours on a plane but the statistics are how likely you are to die during that activity irrelevant of the number of times you do it.
 
I'm not going to stop riding rollercoasters. Far from it.

What I am going to stop is going to Six Flags parks. I'll spend my several thousand dollars a year elsewhere, from now on.
 
rider said:
I'm not going to stop riding rollercoasters. Far from it.

What I am going to stop is going to Six Flags parks. I'll spend my several thousand dollars a year elsewhere, from now on.
Click to expand...

I'll wait until the investigation is complete before i make a decision like that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top