![]() "If I knew one of my rides was going to fall apart, forget the injured, that's my livelihood. "Shame on them if they knew about it and they didn't put something out there to the industry," said Eric Bates, owner of Ohio-based Bates Amusements, a manufacturer and operator of rides in Jefferson County in eastern Ohio. No Fire Ball ride will be at the State Fair this year when it opens Wednesday. KMG didn't respond to email or phone attempts to seek comment. Ride companies and Ohio inspectors rely on manufacturer bulletins to ensure that rides get required maintenance and that newly uncovered safety problems are checked out. ![]() "There was no bulletin sent out from KMG about anything that would indicate any kind of problem like that," said Jill Walls, spokeswoman for New Jersey-based Amusements of America, which operated the Fire Ball ride that broke apart at the Ohio State Fair. ![]() He would say only that they were within the manufacturer's new parameters. "We wanted to know what the actual thickness is." Kane declined to provide any other correspondences on the issue, including the final thickness measurements he returned to KMG. "At the time we had questions about it," and so did a third-party inspection firm, Kane said. There's only one reason the arm would lose thickness at that location: rust, said Bill Kane, a senior administrator with North American Midway Entertainment, the firm that contacted KMG about the issue. Six millimeters is less than one-quarter of 1 inch. To check the thickness, KMG instructed the Canadian firm to first "remove all corroded material and clean surface," and when finished to "protect inside of tube with primer to protect surface against corrosion." The measurements were to be returned to KMG, which set the new required thickness at 3.8 millimeters, down from 6 mm, the letter said. A diagram in the letter pinpoints the area affected - exactly where the Fire Ball's arm broke. Each beam holds a four-passenger gondola. If you suffer injuries at a theme park, amusement park or state fair, discuss the incident with a personal injury attorney.Left unsaid was that KMG had been put on notice about the potential rusting issue more than five years earlier.Īccording to a 2012 letter from KMG to ride operators North American Midway Entertainment in Brantford, Ontario, KMG said it was lowering the minimum required thickness of the steel support beams required to operate the ride.
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