The seat sensor had been intentionally mis-adjusted and that’s why 14-year-old Tyre Sampson fell to his death last month in Florida. New details are emerging from an engineering safety report on the free-fall ride tragedy. The operator isn’t happy to hear it.
Seat sensor was ‘adjusted’
There is a reason why each and every seat on the FreeFall drop tower ride comes factory equipped with a sensor. They detect whether the safety harness is properly positioned or not.
They are there specifically to prevent the tragedy that happened at ICON Park outside Orlando, on March 24.
That fateful day, 14-year-old Tyre Sampson fell to his death because he slipped, feet-first, through “a greater gap than normal between his harness and his seat.” He was not properly secured, the forensic engineering firm found in an initial report. The sensor didn’t fail, it was “rigged.”
The report calls it “adjusted.” It was adjusted to be unsafe and somebody did it on purpose. Another seat had been similarly adjusted. “It is not clear at this time who moved the sensors and why.”
Nikki Fried, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services held a press conference on Friday, April 22, to announce the report findings about the sensor. Her unit is responsible for for inspecting amusement rides.
“Manual adjustments had been made at some point to two seats on the FreeFall drop tower ride.” Tyre was in one of them. “It appears that the ride was not maintained in a safe condition due to what appears to be an intentional adjustment.”
To allow larger riders
The report spells out that those manual sensor adjustments were made “presumably, to allow for larger riders, which should not have happened based on the manufacturer’s guidelines.” It seems that only engineers know how to read those guidelines.
Quest Engineering & Failure Analysis Inc. explains there is no way to know just by looking “when the sensors were moved.” One thing they can say for sure is that it “happened after they were initially put in place.”
The ride has a total to 30 seats. The harness proximity sensor on only two of them had been adjusted. Whoever did it is a killer. “The cause of the subject accident was that Tyre Sampson was not properly secured in the seat primarily due to mis-adjustment of the harness proximity sensor.”
Someone turned a nut to allow adjustment, made the adjustment, then tightened the nut back up. It allowed “larger-than-normal gaps between harnesses and those two seats.” In Tyree’s case, a lot larger.
The whole ride just sits there and hums until each and every sensor gives a green light. That tells the computer that each seat harness “is lowered to produce an acceptable gap between the lowest part of the harness and a raised section of the seat’s front edge.” The “average gap for the unadjusted seats was 3.33 inches.”
The gap in Tyre’s seat was “7.19 inches” but “could have grown to as much as 10 inches with force.” The other seat was gapped at 6.51 inches. The owners manual which nobody read clearly states that the “maximum passenger weight should be 130 kilograms (approximately 287 pounds).” Tyre weighed approximately 340 pounds, his father reported.