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A new legal document offers a clue why two dozen riders of the AtmosFEAR pendulum ride at Oaks Amusement Park were stuck upside down, 50 feet in the air, for 25 minutes on June 14. There wasn’t a specialized tool to lower the ride, and the park had to locate a “big enough” lever, which employees borrowed from Portland Fire & Rescue, attorneys for the amusement park wrote.
The Aug. 5 filing claims there was such a lever somewhere on site. It does not explain why it couldn’t be found to rescue the riders earlier. (Oaks Amusement Park could not be immediately reached for comment.)
The park is being sued for negligence. Its explanation for what happened that day comes out of a legal document filed by attorneys for the Southeast Portland amusement park on Aug. 5 in response to questions posed in one of three lawsuits filed in the wake of the incident.
“There does not exist any specific specialized tool or apparatus to physically or manually lower the ride and no such tool exists because the manufacturer did not anticipate that this type of incident could happen‚” the park’s attorneys wrote. “Rather, defendant needed a lever to physically get the ride to move and manually lower and when the levers it had on hand were not big enough, defendant ultimately borrowed a five-foot-long steel metal rescue bar from the fire department and were able to physically get the ride to lower as a result.”
The lawyers added that there were “large bars onsite,” but that “it was simply quicker to borrow one from the fire department which was standing right there.”
The documents have not yet been filed in court, but they were forwarded yesterday morning by the park’s attorneys to lawyer Michael Fuller, who is representing the plaintiffs in the three lawsuits.