Growing up in Indiana, the state fair was a summer staple. The fried food, the agricultural displays, the games, and the rides are all a part of the fun. But the rides in the fair aren’t always the safest. Unlike actual amusement parks, these rides are disassembled, packed, and transported to various places around the country.
They don’t have the benefit of remaining in one location, being serviced by the proper engineers and experts. One mom from Arkansas learned this the hard way when her two children were stuck on a fair ride, upside down, for 15 minutes.
More from CafeMom: Teen Killed in Freak Accident When Wind Flung Him From Amusement Park Ride
Ally Metzger and her children were riding the X-Drive at the Arkansas State Fair.
Mom Ally Metzger and her family were visiting the Arkansas State Fair in Little Rock last weekend when her children, 8 and 11, decided to ride the X-Drive, the New York Post reported. The attraction is a 16-seat ride that puts riders on one end of a spinning arm. The seats flip and rotate, moving riders all around. Unfortunately, the ride stopped just as Metzger’s children in the air, upside down.
More from CafeMom: Parents Leave 7-Year-Old To Watch Newborn Baby so They Can Ride Roller Coaster
Metzger said she and her partner were panicking.
In a video posted on Facebook, we hear Metzger say, “They’re trying to get my kids down, they’ve been stuck upside down for 15 minutes at least.” As Metzger looked on helplessly, workers attempted to manually spin the ride to help the stranded passengers. Metzger started recording after someone suggested it, 10 minutes into the ordeal.
Later, in an interview with KATV, the mom explained what she was feeling as she watched her children hanging upside down. “There’s a bunch of people trying to get the ride to spin, and they would get it almost halfway down. Then it would go right back up to the very top, with my kids still upside down. So, I’m panicking. My partner’s panicking,” she said.
The children were stuck for 15 minutes.
When crews finally got Metzger’s children down, she was able to get a better look at them. “I looked up my 11-year-old, and it looked like she had passed out. I couldn’t see her. Her eyes were closed,” she recalled. “She told me when she came home that she only remembered crying, and then, like, just got dizzy. Her legs were hurting. I guess because the circulation was out.”
While her children were brought down from the ride and unharmed, Metzger still wanted to understand how this happened.
A carnival employee explained what happened.
Scooter Korek, who works for North American Midway Entertainment, the company responsible for the rides that travel across the nation, explained, “The right computer received a fault,” he told KATV. “What it does is when it finds something that it doesn’t like, it shuts it down. So, the ride was in the air, not in its landing position, for about 10-12 minutes,” said Korek.
Korek, who says he would trust his family riding these rides, says they go through five levels of inspection. “We have a safety director and the Arkansas State Fair ride inspectors. We have the supervisors. They’re looking at these rides. We do third-party periodic inspections, and the most important is the guys running these rides. They travel with us wherever we go,” Korek explained.
'That jolted everything,' Metzger said.
But all of those checks didn’t matter for Metzger and her children. “We candidly talked about it, and they said I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening. We had planned this weekend, but that jolted everything.”
