By: Matthew Wang

On an otherwise perfect day, a roller coaster in Cedar Point Amusement Park, located in Ohio, teetered at the edge of a 205 foot drop, leaving riders stranded, with help far away.

The tallest roller coaster in the world when it debuted in 1989, the Magnum XL-200 was Cedar Point’s call to fame and set a Guinness World Record. However, Cedar Point’s famed roller coaster recently suffered a mechanical problem, stalling riders hundreds of feet in the air.

In a news report by Fox News explaining the incident, “Tony Clark, director of communications for Cedar Point, [explained] that the incident was the result of a “standard ride stoppage” which triggered the guest evacuation… He added that this was a “check engine light” situation and the ride couldn’t be immediately restarted,” (foxnews.com, 2023). However, from the rider’s perspective, their relatively short time on the ride would have been horrifying, without any warning as to when the ride would start once more, or even worse, roll back down the slope it had been climbing.

Shortly after the ride’s stoppage, the dozen or so passengers of the Magnum XL-200 were seen led down the ride by staff members, taking a harrowing set of steep stairs, leading down from the ride’s first peak. Photographed inching their way down by grasping the hand bars, none of the passengers appeared to be injured, although many were visibly shaken.

This incident was just one of many roller coaster shutdowns nationwide recently, as countless other roller coasters have suffered mechanical failure, with one roller coaster suspending its occupants upside down for hours. NPR reports that “Eight passengers… were stuck upside down for several hours as rescue teams scrambled to conduct a mid-air evacuation” (NPR.org, 2023). NPR also added that a roller coaster in North Carolina was shut down due to a fissure in a support beam, and yet another roller coaster in its trial stages, located along with the XL-200 in Cedar Point, shut down unexpectedly twice.