Photo credit: AP | This aerial photo shows The Texas Giant roller coaster ride which sits idle at the Six Flags Over Texas park Saturday in Arlington, Texas. Investigators will try to determine if a woman who died while riding the roller coaster at the amusement park Friday night fell from the ride after some witnesses said she wasn't properly secured. (July 20, 2013)
ARLINGTON, Texas - An Arlington police sergeant says a woman who died while riding a roller coaster at a Six Flags amusement park in North Texas fell from the ride.
Sgt. Christopher Cook told The Associated Press on Saturday that police believe the woman fell Friday at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, and that there appears to have been no foul play.
He says police, fire and emergency medical services responded to the park around 6:45 p.m. Friday in reference to a woman who had fallen from a train car while riding a roller coaster. He says she was pronounced dead at the scene.
She had been riding the Texas Giant. Dubbed the tallest steel-hybrid coaster in the world, it reaches 14 stories high, drops 79 degrees and banks 95 degrees. Witnesses told area media outlets the woman fell.
Carmen Brown told The Dallas Morning News that she was waiting in line to get on the ride when the accident happened and witnessed the woman being strapped in.
"She goes up like this. Then when it drops to come down, that's when it (the safety bar) released and she just tumbled," Brown, of Arlington, told the newspaper. "They didn't secure her right. One of the employees from the park ? one of the ladies ? she asked her to click her more than once, and they were like, 'As long you heard it click, you're OK.' Everybody else is like, 'Click, click, click.'
"Hers only clicked once. Hers was the only one that went down once, and she didn't feel safe, but they let her still get on the ride," Brown said.
Six Flags said the ride will be closed as the investigation continues, and a concert scheduled for Saturday was canceled.
The Texas Giant can carry up to 24 riders. It first opened in 1990 as an all-wooden coaster but underwent a $10 million renovation to install steel-hybrid rails and reopened in 2011.
When the car that the woman had been riding in returned to the loading zone, two people got out and were visibly upset, Rockwell resident John Putman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
"They were screaming, 'My mom! My mom! Let us out, we need to go get her!" Putman told the newspaper.
Also Friday, an Ohio amusement park's thrill ride malfunctioned when a boat accidentally rolled backward down a hill and flipped over in water, injuring all seven people on it. Operators stopped the Shoot the Rapids water ride after the accident, said officials with Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.
Six Flags Over Texas opened in 1961 and was the first amusement park in the Six Flags system. It is 17 miles west of downtown Dallas. The park's first fatality happened in 1999. A 28-year-old Arkansas woman drowned and 10 other passengers were injured when a raft-like boat on the Roaring Rapids ride overturned in 2 to 3 feet of water.
There were 1,204 ride-related injuries reported in the United States in 2011 ? about 4.3 for every million visitors ? according to the National Safety Council's most recent data. Of those, 61 were deemed serious, the March 2013 report said, and roller coasters accounted for 405 injuries.
Fatalities were not listed in the report, which was prepared for Alexandria, Va.-based International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. Also, only 144 of the 383 amusement facilities with rides in the United States responded to the survey.
A 2005 report to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated just over four people died annually on amusement rides from 1987 to 2002. The estimate includes both mobile amusement park rides and fixed-site rides.
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