Volume 3, No. 16. August 22,2003
Power
to the people
The weather, for
a change, was perfect: blue skies and warm temperatures. After a summer of cold
and rain, and with school vacation winding down, the crowds came, to amusement
parks, waterparks and zoos.
Then,
lights out.
The
power failures that swamped the upper Midwest and Eastern Seaboard last Thursday
cut short the day at amusement parks and zoos throughout the region (see story
in Extra!
Extra!). Not all. Ohio’s Six Flags Worlds of Adventure lies in Aurora,
one of the few Cleveland metroplex’s communities that didn’t lose
power. Toledo, Ohio, went dark, but the Toledo Zoo lost power only for a few
minutes.
Meanwhile,
as power dissipated from much of northern Ohio, southern Ontario, upstate New
York and New York City a few minutes after 4 p.m. (16,00), parks and zoos were
forced to close down and evacuate guests. Operations at those properties, however,
continued.
Paramount
Canada’s Wonderland,
Vaughan, Ontario
Kris Williams,
public relations manager, was accompanying a media crew doing interviews for
the theme park’s upcoming Portuguese Festival when suddenly “Everything
became very silent,” she said. She realized power was out around her, and
soon learned the whole park was without power. Full evacuations of all rides
were completed in 15 minutes she said. “You work through these things in
practice and study all the procedures in place,” Williams said. “When
you have an opportunity to work with those programs, you’re always pleased
when everything goes as planned.”
Most
of the rides were either in station or, with the coasters, heading for the stations.
“Explaining that to the media was interesting,” Williams said. “They
were shooting pictures of where coasters might have been.”
As
park officials learned the breadth of the outage they decided still to keep
the park open as long as possible. With Toronto’s mass transit stalled
and no streetlights operating on the roads, “We didn’t want people
to leave all at once,” Williams said. “We wanted people to be prepared
when they left to take precautions, and we wanted to allow authorities to set
up traffic control.” With temperatures hovering around 28 Celsius (82 Fahrenheit),
Wonderland kept the waterpark open so guests could cool off in the wave pool
(sans waves) and river (sans current).
At
7 p.m. (19,00) park officials decided to close to the public and handed out
complimentary passes and refunds. “The out-of-town guests took the refunds,”
Williams said. “We handed out more complimentary passes. I thought it was
an appropriate gesture because guests didn’t get a full day.” The
park offered bottled water and food to guests at guest services and at the front
gate, plus to the York Region Police officers assisting with traffic outside
the park. Staff, meanwhile, were treated to a freezer-emptying barbecue. “At
that point we did not know how long we would be without power.”
Overnight,
as it turned out. But with the province under a state of emergency and a directive
to conserve energy, Wonderland remained closed through Saturday, opening Sunday
with the blessings of the power company. The directive to cut power use by 50
percent still stands, however, and by cutting off water fountains, water pumps
on some waterslides and unnecessary lights at food and games locations and rides,
the park is using only 4.5 megawatts of power, well below its 10 megawatt capability,
Williams said. “We’re fortunate in that the weather has been fairly
cooperative.” For a change.
New
York Aquarium,
Brooklyn, New York
What
Fran Hackett, associate manager of communications at the New York Aquarium learned
from this citywide blackout was how hot New York City gets without air conditioning.
And, “We learned that Con Edison is pretty darn good. We love them.”
Strange
to hear somebody waxing romantic about the power company that shouldered some
of the blame, but Con Edison crews took special care of the aquarium. When the
lights went out at 4:11 (16,11), the aquarium evacuated “in a very orderly
fashion” while battery-fueled lights were still on. The aquarium had generators
for some exhibits, but not for the whole park; of particular concern were the
fish in the penguin tanks and the sharks in their own tanks which were not being
aerated. “And sharks are very fragile,” Hackett said.
With
a call from the aquarium, Con Edison showed up immediately with two compressor
trucks to aerate the penguin and shark tanks, a mobile generator to power the
Alien Stingers exhibit, and a major generator truck providing 3,000 amps of
electric fuel for the rest of the facility. Meantime, the power company took
the aquarium off the New York City power grid. “They waited until they
got everybody else up, and then they switched us back over to the city grid,”
Hackett said. “Everybody’s lights probably dimmed when they did.”
The aquarium reopened as normal on Saturday.
Hackett
viewed the whole episode as a minor hassle, especially since the Coney Island
area, where the aquarium is located, turned into a big block party. “I
lost all my ice cream in the freezer at home,” she said. “That’s
what I was most upset about.”
Seabreeze
Park,
Rochester, New York
Rob Norris,
president of Seabreeze Park, wasn’t too surprised. His amusement park already
was considering buying auxiliary lighting, which he has since rented to finish
out the season. “We’ve always had beautiful power here, but lately
it was starting to get a little twitchy,” he said. “I guess that’s
a product of the days of deregulation.”
This
power outage was more of a concern for what was happening outside the park than
inside. “As much as a hardship or disappointment it was, the whole process
went well,” Norris said. “The coasters were on track or in station,
so none were on the lift chain. The log flume was the only thing to unload.
Everything else was home.” The food stands served guests who could pay
with cash (“We’ve got to try to find a better way to make change,”
Norris said, a lesson learned), and the waterpark pools remained open. “We
just kept monitoring the chlorine level. When it dropped below the state standards,
we closed it down." The staff also “scrambled to get generators going
for the freezers,” Norris said. “We didn’t want to lose our Dippin’
Dots.”
Like
Paramount Canada’s Wonderland, Seabreeze did not immediately close the
park, allowing traffic jams to clear. By 5:30 (17,30) the park was “pretty
much” closed, Norris said. “It was natural attrition out the gates.
We kind of eased people out of the park, didn’t push them. It was amazing
how nice and orderly and calm it was.” Park officials provided traffic
reports with suggestions for auxiliary routes as guests departed. Guests also
received rainchecks. “It was very well received that we did that,”
Norris said.
The
power returned at 1:30 a.m. and Seabreeze reopened as normal the next day. “People
in this area weren’t inconvenienced that much,” Norris said. “We
had a major ice storm in the spring and lost power for three or four days. What’s
six hours?”
Cleveland
Metroparks Zoo,
Cleveland, Ohio
“The
computers started making a funny noise and everything shut down,” said
Susan Allen, the Metroparks Zoo manager of marketing and public relations. “I
thought it was a blip. We take power bumps every once and a while.” She
called a radio station to work out an advertising schedule and learned then
that power was out across northern Ohio. So, she started listening to her Sony
Walkman “and soon realized power was out in a lot more places than Northern
Ohio. The freakiest part was not knowing what’s going on, listening to
the news and not getting any answers.”
Because
the zoo closes at 5 pm (17,00) anyway, the keepers were already preparing to
take the animals in for the night, and guests were already filtering out the
gate. All essential power was fueled by generators. “The facilities people
kicked into high gear to make sure everything in the animal buildings that needed
to be working were working.” The rhinos stayed out for the night, and the
door between the indoor orangutan exhibit and their holding area wouldn’t
work, so the apes stayed in their exhibit for the night.
Power
returned to the zoo between 6:30 and 7 the following morning. “By 8:20
we were back in business,” Allen said. But the mayor had asked people to
stay out of downtown until at least noon, and being located near downtown zoo
officials decided to postpone the normal 10 a.m. opening two hours. With the
city on a boil water alert the zoo shut down its drinking fountains and sold
only bottled drinks. “Bottled water was flying off the shelf,” Allen
said. In the hot weather, about 1,700 people visited Metroparks Zoo on Friday,
a figure Allen calls “OK, not bad.”
Allen said the event was a good learning experience for the zoo, but mostly
it was just “one big darn inconvenience and pain in the neck.” That
Thursday morning she had staged a media event to introduce the zoo’s new
baby giraffe. “I thought we’d have great photos and footage of the
giraffe the next day. Not!” She made up for it this week, staging a media
debut for the zoo’s 2-week-old black rhino.
Cedar Point,
Sandusky, Ohio
Finally,
Cedar Point was enjoying the perfect day. The weather was beautiful, the park
near capacity. Even Top Thrill Dragster had been running consistently
through the day. At 4:10 (16,10) everything stopped.
Cedar
Point officials had no idea why the power went out throughout the park, but
the staff bolted into action. “I was proud to be a Cedar Point employee,”
said Public Relations Manager Janice Witherow. “The employees, both full-time
and seasonal, really stepped up to the plate.” All but two of the park’s
68 rides were evacuated within 30 minutes, she said. The Iron Dragon
suspended roller coaster, with a mid-track lift hill, took 45 minutes to get
all the riders off with a boom lift. The Space Spiral was lowered and
cleared in about an hour. Millennium Force had stopped near the top of
its 310-foot lift hill, but that ride has backup generators which sent the coaster’s
train over the top and back to the station. Staff moved up and down the midway
with tubs of ice and bottled water to hand out to guests and employees alike.
The
park’s primary concern were the guests staying at Cedar Point’s hotels,
cabins and cottages. The park ordered such food as donuts and bagels—“Anything
that didn’t require electricity,” Witherow said—called in backup
generators and sent staff out to round up “hundreds of flashlights,”
she said. “It was a very impressive scenario, given the scope of the situation,”
she said. “Our guests were so compassionate and real understanding and
real troopers about the whole situation.”
With
no power to the entire Cedar Point Peninsula, park officials were having trouble
understanding the full scale of the power failure. “We had employees listening
to their car radios,” Witherow said. “Once we learned the severity
of the problem and that it was not specific to Cedar Point, we made the decision
to evacuate and close the park.” Most guests had already started leaving
an hour into the blackout. The park officially closed at 7:30 (19,30).
Power was restored to Cedar Point 30 minutes later.
THE LOOP is written and produced by Eric Minton, Minton Enterprises, LLC. To see more examples of Eric Minton's work and Minton Enterprises services, visit www.ericminton.com.
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