As many as 150 passengers were stranded on the world’s largest ferris wheel in Las Vegas last week, in terrifying scenes that were afterwards shared on social media.
The 550-foot tall attraction, which opened on the world famous Las Vegas strip in 2014, stopped working on 18 September following a technical fault, which was thought to have been caused by a “connectivity issue” with one of its cabin.
Fire responders worked from around midnight to 2am in the morning to rescue those who were trapped on the Ferris wheel, which is the world’s largest.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, although the wheel afterwards returning to usual operations, those who were trapped on the attraction were left frightened and scarred for days.
One user on TikTok, @esmyyyyyy, said she was in a cabin that began to tilt at an alarming angle, causing her and people sharing her cabin to call 911 because “we thought we were going to die”.
“So first, all the TVs and everything shut down, so we didn’t know what was going on,” she said in footage that has been seen more than 1.7m times, “and then it started tilting, and it wouldn’t stop.
“Obviously, it was like, really scary. I thought I was going to die,” she went on. ”Like, I genuinely thought I was going to die, so I started calling everyone I knew and told them I was going to die. So it’s like really traumatic.”
She added in another TikTok that she afterwards used ice packs to heal body aches, because everyone inside her cabin was forced to brace themselves up against the glass sides for almost two hours.
Another TikTok user, @mrs.christen, said that she “spent all day” convincing her husband to go on the world’s tallest Ferris wheel and were then stranded at “the very top”, 550-feet above the Las Vegas strip.
“All they would tell us is that they were working on it,” she said in the video, and that she “had no idea what happened” afterwards. That footage has been viewed more than 2.7m times on TikTok.
In a statement to The Independent, Ceasars Entertainment, who own and operate the High Roller Observation Wheel, said “The High Roller Observation Wheel was stopped during its rotation on Friday night, due to a network connectivity issue involving one of the cabins.”
“Approximately 150 passengers were aboard the wheel at the time. Engineers resolved the network issue within approximately 90 minutes, the wheel’s rotation resumed, and all passengers safely disembarked and received refunds.”
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