SaiyanHajime
CF Legend
To be fair, Cedar Point's "precautions" are the most ludicrous in the entire industry.Intricks said:
When it rains, they drop to one train operation to avoid any potential for a coaster to slip through it's breaks and crash into another train, the most common cause of coaster "crashes" (usually just a bump). And in fairness, this accident happened to them with their Arrow hyper. And the exact same thing happened to Blackpool's. So it is a genuine concern. Any coaster with more than 2 trains they just outright close. I can understand this, makes sense, I'll tolerate it.
But, if it even so much as looks like it'll rain they start closing stuff to take trains off.
When I went and asked whats up with operations, because NO ONE once did a PA announcement, I was told "it... might rain" really awkwardly as if the staff member KNEW it was a crock of turd. The sky was grey and in fairness it did rain later that day... When the park closed, on our drive to the hotel near Kings Island. It then rained all night and the entire time we were at Kings Island. Nothing dropped to single train operations, nothing closed. They're the same company, in the same state, why the hell are they following different procedures? A mouse sneeze worth of liquid on a track will not cause a coaster to slip through it's breaks, so until it ACTUALLY starts raining, there's absolutely no need to implement a rain policy.
I presume that, in order to keep thing objective, they start following the rain policy if the local weather predicts a precipitation likeliness above a certain percent OR if it starts randomly raining?
The thing about all this is there will always be freak weather and we can't all just stop getting on with our lives just in case there is.
The other problem is the lack of explanation or understanding around park safety policies leads to people (me included) making assumptions and it looks like parks make it up as they go along.
Unrelated story... For example, at Dollywood they open their coasters for their Christmas event if the temp gets above 40f. That's what the lady on the ticket booth said. Tornado and Thunderhead were closed all day on this one particular visit - they had snow on their tracks. But they tried all day to get Wild Eagle open. They kept testing it, over and over. Eventually it opened for a short while, but once Mystery Mine opened, it stayed open. It stayed open into the evening. When it was dark. And definitely colder than 40f. I ASSUME the temp in the afternoon sun was flickering at around 40, allowing them to start testing, but then it would drop a degree so they couldn't open to public. But maybe they have another rule that states if a coaster has been running consistently for x amount of time, you can stay open as low as, just for arguments sake, 35f explaining why Mystery Mine stayed open? Maybe it;s to do with it being partially indoors? Maybe.... I dunno. Or maybe they just make **** up as they go along.
