The incident happened on the Magic Carpet Ride at the 95th Annual National Cherry Festival in Traverse City.
Scary footage circulating online shows the moment a ride at the 95th Annual National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Michigan, malfunctioned and began spinning out of control.
As the Magic Carpet Ride begins to sway back and forth, the foundation begins to rise and tip backward. Bystanders watching the horrific incident then began to rush over to stop the ride from tipping over.
The incident happened at around 11 p.m., according to UpNorthLive News. And one of their producers, Trevor Drew, was on the ride when it happened.
“The ride goes, and I guess it's kind of hard to tell once you're in the air. I could tell it was a lot more violent and seemed a little more shaky,” he explained.
Another bystander, Joy Ogemaw, said they were positioned right in front of the ride and heard a loud bang as the ride began to spin out of control.
"It was like scraping, and then it started going faster because it wasn't stopping them started going faster, and then it started like rocking a little bit back and forth and then it started like going more and then like, it was to the point where the base of it was like leaning way back, and I was like, that looks like it's about to like fall back into the river right now and I was like, it was just, I cannot believe what I was seeing,” they said.
Joe Evans from Arnold Amusement, Inc., the company that provided the ride, praised the bystanders who risked their safety to help the riders in need. But he says they now need to determine what went wrong.
“Obviously, there was a malfunction,” he states. “We don't know as of yet what it was.”
"The ride has been dismantled it is gone, and it is on its way back to the factory, the company that makes it is in Ohio, and it's on its way down there for them to figure out what, what happened was it is, was it a malfunction was a computer glitch, we don't know. We're just not sure what it was.”
Arnold Amusement explained that rides are rigorously inspected by employees every day, the state inspects them every year, and a third party also inspects their rides three times a year.
No serious injuries have been reported.
