New inspection rules apply to ride pulled from fair
The company that had a ride removed from the Ohio State Fair last week over safety concerns says the attraction will remain shut down until its manufacturer can inspect it and recommend a fix.
But the manufacturer, Chance Rides, of Wichita, Kansas, says it’s not involved in any assessment of the 70-foot wheel ride that it manufactured in 1988, called the Sky Diver.
Whether Chance Rides would participate would depend on whether the operator, Kissel Entertainment, of Okeana, in southwestern Ohio, followed a December 2017 safety bulletin concerning general inspections for corrosion.
“We’re still in a learning curve,” said Jeff Roth, vice president of administration with Chance Rides. “It’s a whole brave new world for (ride operators) to have to do this” extensive testing.
A Kissel spokesman, Eric German, said Wednesday that the firm has followed the bulletin. The Sky Diver has been taken to a Kissel facility in Alabama, and the operator is waiting for Chance Rides to tell them how to proceed, German said.
“It’s really up to (Chance Rides) to say what they need to do,” German said. “They’re the engineers.”
“In the old days, we would help a lot,” Roth said. “But now that the bar has been raised, we don’t give that approval without proper documentation,” usually based on the recommendations of a third-party engineer.
At a news conference last week, Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Dorothy Pelanda called the disqualified ride “Kissel’s Military Base,” but state inspection documents released this week call it the Sky Diver, the name also listed on Kissel’s website. Corrosion caused the Sky Diver to be removed from the Ohio State Fair last week. The ride has been disassembled and is awaiting repairs in Alabama.
Department spokeswoman Shelby Croft said officials identified the ride by what was written on the side of it. A “stop operation order” cited “corrosion found on main sweep arms“and other components.
Inspectors don’t know whether Kissel completed the required safety inspections based on the 2017 bulletin because the inspection never got that far, Croft said. Two inspections would have been required since then,because the bulletin required annual inspections by “competent personnel, capable of understanding the function of the parts and their proper installation,” on all Chance’s rides that were more than 10 years old.
Inspectors had to use “one or more” of five methods, starting with visual inspections and ending with a “borescope” that could see inside certain components and an “ultrasonic corrosion gauge” to measure steel thickness.
“The bulletin was a result of the Ohio State Fair,” Roth said.
In 2017, interior corrosion caused the 72-foot-tall, 54-ton Fire Ball ride to break apart at the Ohio State Fair, killing Tyler Jarrell, 18, who was thrown from a gondola. Six others were injured; one
of them, Jennifer Lambert, 19, suffered major brain damage and died in September 2018.
The Fire Ball’s manufacturer, Netherlands-based KGM, determined that rust that developed inside a support beam “dangerously reduced the beam’s wall thickness over the years,” which “finally led to the catastrophic failure of the ride during operation.”
Kissel Entertainment supplied 14 rides for the Ohio State Fair, German said. It is a subcontractor for Talley Amusements, of Fort Worth, Texas, which has the contract to provide rides for this year’s fair.
In 2018, the state fair fired the New Jersey company that owned the Fire Ball, Amusements of America, which had held the rides contract for 26 years.
Kissel Entertainment doesn’t think its Sky Diver is unsafe, German said.
“The corrosion needs to be addressed, so there are ways to do that, to mitigate the corrosion,” German said. “I think it falls under the term ‘an overabundance of precaution’ based on what happened in 2017.”