Tourists trapped for hours in flying-carousel ride in China
Firefighters were called to amusement park during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday
Tourists were left hanging in mid-air for two hours waiting to be rescued, after an amusement-park ride broke down in eastern China on Monday afternoon, during the Dragon Boat Festival public holiday.
The flying-carousel ride left 23 people stranded, including children, when it stopped working at Ganglong Lehui theme park in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.
No casualties were reported, according to a Weibo post by the Public Security Bureau-run Shaanxi Internet Police.
The park called firefighters after its hour-long efforts to free the visitors failed.
A video by Beijing News showed the site surrounded by police, while two cranes lifted people, one-by-one, from the ride to the ground.
“We received a call at 1.54 and were there in seven or eight minutes,” said Cao Yifei, head of Suzhou’s Wuzhong district firefighters.
“Altogether, from arriving to rescuing everyone, it took two hours. There were four or five children and a few people had sunstroke, so we gave them glucose to drink when they got down.”
Temperatures reached 31 degrees Celsius in the city on Monday.
“A flying-carousel ride was hoisted up as normal and spun around twice but then suddenly stopped,” a tourist who was at the scene told PearVideo. “It didn’t move again or come down. I brought two children to play in the park and they were both up there.”
The Beijing News video said the amusement park was investigating the breakdown.
In a similar incident in May 2016 a roller coaster, 70 metres off the ground, malfunctioned at a theme park in southeastern Jiangxi province, stranding visitors for over an hour, and in February 2017 a 13-year-old girl died after being flung from a ride at Chaohua Amusement Park in Chongqing, southwest China.
