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Power cut at Alton Towers

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^It even made Sky News yesterday...

The media however are typically annoying... The way it's written will make people think that the rides will actually just stop in the middle if there's no power...

No problems in the end and the park stayed open an extra hour to make up for it...
 
I agree, Benin, the media does get overexcited at park power cuts - just like CWoA's power cut last season (I think) where people had to jump over the lions to escape the monorail!

Several seasons ago, Thorpe suffered from them on a nearly daily basis for about a month!

It's news for the sake of news.

And LOL at the fat bloke in the front row of Oblivion in the photo used for the Daily Ma*l article that Slayed posted.
 
It's disgusting and would never have happened if the Tories were in power! I blame the Poles... Or the Muslims... Peter André likes roller coasters, he always looks great...

Or some other Mail kind of response ;)

Yeah, 40 minute power cut... Totally gutting, ruined days, etc, etc, etc... :roll:
 
I was there :p
Was queuing for the flume at the time....and the whole place just ground too a halt. The Music stopped along with the ride, and was replaced by the breakdown announcement on a near constant loop. Staff ran to the lifthills and explained the situation to the trapped guests (with one boat stopped right on the top of the drop)....at this point we realized that the skyride had stopped as well, with rumours spreading in the que that the whole park was down. Staff obviously did little to inform the que as they were busy dealing with guests trapped on the ride.
We decided to leave the que, and try to walk to the dark forrest (assuming that the power would return shortly and the que for th13teen would be short due to guests leaving) at this point the toilets didn't even flush...
The skyride was winched back to rescue people stranded with a diesel motor (we were told by a member of staff dealing with a thousand chavs asking why the skyride was going but nothing else was) :roll:
An interesting point is that I never realised quite how noisy Alton actually is...it was quite erie walking around it in complete silence.
When we arrived in Dark Forrest Th13teen was evacuated from the lift hill, and both Rita trains were in the station. The area music started again 40 minutes or so after the initial outage, and Rita fired a test train about twenty minutes later. The Th13teen queline reopened after about another half hour, and I ran into the SRQ, which stretched to the top of the steps inside the building. The staff filled the rear of the trains with SRQ riders, so I was on back row within another ten minutes.
What hasn't been mentioned in the media is that all entry tickets were validated for any other date (including special events) on request, and all car parking was free, which was very good on the part of Alton.
I will write a full TR later, but I thought people might like to know what actually went on, rather than what the daily mail wrote about the day! :p
 
^Been there done that at Chessie... Twice... ;)

But unsuprisingly it sounds like the staff did the right thing, but I would not want to be working on Skyride whilst that is using it's backup generator and actually moving...

I did laugh at your point about the toilets not flushing during a park-wide power cut though :p
 
It happened again today, for an hour and a half at about 2 o clock.

We headed down Haunted Hallow and nothing was on and thought nothing of it, then we got to Duel and it was closed and everything was off, and was told tht Katanya Canyon and Forbidden Valley were cut off as well. It's so wierd how quiet it was! So we went to Mutiny Bay and was told by the ride op on Mauraders Mayhem that they have been told to close all of the rides in the park, even though the power was still on everywhere else. Not sure why, but at least there were shops and toilets and everything open around there. Plus it was nice and sunny, lots of people sat on the grass.

Anyway, I had the ingenious idea of waiting in Forbidden Valley for the power to come back on but the rest of the park opened beforehand so we went to Charlie and the area that was actually cut off with power opened a bit later. Just like yesterday, all guests were given free parking and the opportunity to come back free of charge just by showing todays ticket at the gate. Also, the park closed at 7 instead of half past five.

The park was absolutley heaving, and there were so many breakdowns throughout the day (especially Th13teen) that the queue for Guests Services was massive even before the power cut. But those who actually stayed till the end and didn't leave in a huff would have been able to get everything done easy. We got one ride done in the first 4 hours, then pretty much everything done including rerides on Oblivion and Th13teen.

Terrible days for Alton, but I feel that they've dealt with the issues pretty well.
 
^ deadly serious the toilets didn't flush :p
It was the mutiny bay ones....I assume they have electric pumps to circulate the water or something? Taps worked, but only cold.
Yeah, can't fault the staff at all, the Ride ops on Th13teen did an especially good job, responding with good humor to the same questions hundreds of times...and keeping children in the line entertained.
Why would skyride be scary on the generators? Excuse my ignorance if it something blindingly obvious please! :p
And I was told by several staff that it was the first time they had experienced a power cut to the whole park.
 
^The toilets thing was more of a thing of being suprised that they wouldn't work considering the flush is powered electrically ;)

And the scariness of working on Skyride because of numerous people seeing it moving and being generally annoying... :D
 
aha the staff did come in for some abuse because skyride was "working" so why shouldn't th13teen ;)
the number of times they explained...some people :roll:
the park did handle it fantastically though :)
 
Ian said:
CWoA's power cut last season (I think) where people had to jump over the lions to escape the monorail!
Was There
And nobody was screaming or anything like that, people were just getting annoyed that there day was ruined and they had to go home.
We all got free tickets for another day and although i wasnt at that part of the park at the time, none of the staff was rushing over there to get to the monorail and nobody was shouting and screaming, running around the park about it
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
^How about not being very selective of Ian's post as he was NOT saying that it happened, he was giving an example of how over the top the media get...
 
^ Yes i know that, and im following it on by saying that he was right, the media were over doing it by those reasons and so forth.
I only missed out on mentioning the media in my post, sorry about that ;)
 
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