“Just Don’t Look Down!!” is the playful warning attached to the Mega Drop.
The travelling ride carries showgoers to a height of 43 metres before suddenly dropping them at a purported speed of 210km/h.
The “ride above all rides” is designed to give thrill-seekers a “pure adrenaline rush” safe in the knowledge their harness will protect them against the “acceleration of 1.5G-Force and the MASSIVE Deceleration of 5.5G-Force”.
But on 14 May, at the Kilcoy Show in Queensland, two young women say they were left without that reassurance after an alleged technical malfunction saw their harnesses open up while the ride was rising from the ground.
One of them, 12-year-old Holly Brown, leapt out of her seat when the ride was at a height of six or seven metres, Holly’s mother, Katie Sanzo, told Guardian Australia.
Her friend Vanessa* sat alone with the ride suspended 10 metres above ground, clutching on to her harness and not knowing what had happened to Holly.
“[Vanessa] was stuck up there with a seatbelt that wasn’t locked in and she thought that Holly had died because of the thump that Holly made when she had fallen,” Sanzo said.
“She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t look down. She couldn’t do anything. So she was up there for 15 minutes, hysterically crying [after] thinking Holly had died. It was pretty traumatic for all of them.”
Moments earlier, when the ride was about a metre off the ground, the harnesses opened, Sanzo said. Holly, a “thrill-seeker”, was not holding on to hers and it popped up – out of her reach.
Holly said she had been on the ride earlier that day and was excited to go up again.
“When it [the harness] first opened I thought it was no big deal,” Holly said. “I was like: ‘What’s going on?’”
But then she thought: “If I didn’t jump now I probably would die. So I just jumped.”
Holly said she “blacked out in midair”.
Thankfully, both girls survived.
Holly is hazy on exactly what happened. She remembers “excruciating pain”. She remembers lying in the lap of her friend’s mother. She remembers paramedics arriving, administering painkillers, the ambulance driving her for an hour to hospital.
Her friend though, she said, “remembers everything”.
In the days since, Holly has been in physical pain and said she has had sleepless nights “wondering what could have happened”.
Holly suffered a fracture in her foot, but Sanzo knows it might have been so much worse. “I could have lost my daughter that day,” she said.
Holly had travelled from her home in Geelong to the Moreton Bay hinterland for a friend’s 13th birthday.
“It was her first time flying by herself,” Sanzo says. “So it was really exciting to go.”
Upon hearing of the accident, Sanzo flew up to be with her daughter. The pair have since returned home and Holly went back to school on crutches on Wednesday – though she had to go home early due to the pain in her ankle.
“There was a definitely a lot of questions,” she said of her first day back.
Sanzo, who is 30 weeks pregnant, has taken early maternity leave to take care of Holly.
Queensland Workplace Health and Safety confirmed they are undertaking an investigation and in discussions with the ride operator, P&C Amusements.
P&C Amusements did not respond to calls for this story.
The Kilcoy Show president, David Dunn, declined to answer questions. The show does not own or operate the ride.
Sanzo said she was grateful her daughter would be OK. “She’s pretty sore,” she said. “But she’s doing the best she can.”
But Holly’s days of enjoying carnival rides are done. “After that experience, no, I won’t let any of my children on any of those things ever again,” Sanzo said.
*Not her real name
