Water Rides
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Flumes and floods L
Splash Battle by Preston & Barbieri at Marineland, Antibes, France
slides aren’t cheap either. ”The investment of a water ride is certainly comparable to some smaller water rides,” reckons Roeser. “We see Twist ‘n’ Splash as perfect for waterparks. With a small footprint and a relatively small investment the parks get a great attraction that is interesting both for riders and spectators.” “I attended a waterpark show
in Las Vegas in 2006 and experienced that the waterpark operators are still quite conventional as they understand their business and want to avoid more technically advanced attractions,” adds Houben. “Happily we see new trends emerging such as [the rollercoaster at] Yas Waterworld in Abu Dhabi.”
It should come as no surprise that WhiteWater acquired Hopkins late last year. But what are some of the operational considerations parks owners – wet or dry – need to make when adding water rides? According to our experts they include such things as water treatment, power for the pumps and, a potential revenue earner rather than a cost, large dryers (such as those offered by Haystack Dryers) to placate wet guests. And build yourself in a little extra room around the loading area, warns Czibulka: “Since water rides are normally very family-oriented and therefore cater for a rather large ridership, long queue lines need to be considered.”
Nice problem to have? 34
og flumes emerged as a variation of the chute rides and old mill rides that were popular in the United States in the early 20th Century. Both of these types of rides took rather simple approaches to handling water flow. It wasn't until Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon, founders of Arrow Development, got involved and studied hydrodynamics that the use of water flow in an amusement ride was fully exploited. The first modern day log flume amusement ride was constructed by Arrow as El Aserradero at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, Texas, which opened in 1963 and is still in operation today. Speaking to Park World in 1993, Morgan and Bacon were asked which of all their ride developments (including rollercoasters) they found most satisfying. Karl Bacon was quick to respond. "Flumes. Like everything else we did, we made a prototype and first a one-foot-wide engineered channel to control the water and learn how to handle the water problems. From there we made a short, full- size flume ride, complete with large pumps and full- size boats. We tried it out and got control of that." "At the time, Bacon expanded, "there was nothing else in any of the parks that was similar. There were slow boat rides but nothing you see in the flume. That was the first time that any ride went through two stages of water flow, what we called subcritical and supercritical water flow. Canal water, for example, always flows at subcritical speed. To make the ride exciting we had to have some speed in it so we went into supercritical flow." "To some people," Morgan continued, "the flume ride looks like a ditch of water but it's actually tremendously complex. The hydrodynamics that go with it are part of the design and are not simple in any sense of the word. We had some interesting experiences with the ride and they were very educational. Karl can better explain this than I, because he was the driving force behind understanding the dynamics of the water flow, but we found out that if the design went askew in any way you could build up a turbulence that would eventually back up water. Over a period of time, as the size of the flumes grew, the size of the pumps
Arrow’s first ever flume ride, at Six Flags Over Texas Ride pioneers Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan
grew with them. Any time you were pumping a lot of water, if anything went wrong and you got a turbulence area, it filled up and you could eventually start throwing water over the side of the trough and flood the whole end of an amusement park." "One good example of that," Bacon recalled, "is when we put the flume ride in Six Flags Over Georgia. We kept trying to make the water go faster to keep it exciting, but when you're in supercritical flow and you have to get the boat in the station, you have to be extremely careful how you handle the transition. We had a section built into that ride with a long slope with fast moving water. It had a nice transition to get up into the station. When the ride shut down, however, all the water would be in this little section. You couldn't start the ride again because if the new water from the pump came in there, the existing water would dissipate the energy and you could never get the ride up to supercritical flow." "We put in a large, six-inch diameter drain valve to drain the water out and return it to the reservoir when the ride was shut down," Bacon continued. "We got the ride going fine, then Ed and I went off the lunch. Before we left, we told the ride operators to remember that if the pumps cut down because of a recurring electrical problem, to be sure to drain the water out of that section of the flume before restart. I could tell by their reaction that they thought it was a bunch of horse manure and wasn't very important. When Ed and I returned, the first thing we saw was water everywhere. The channel was full, it was running all over the shrubbery and down the walkways. Everybody was running and yelling. That day we made believers out of them." After that first flume for Six Flags Over Texas, Arrow built a second for Cedar Point. “We were quite late with it and they were pretty disappointed with us,” recalls Bacon. “We finally got it going and it was obviously very popular with their patrons from the lines of people waiting to ride. Yet Cedar Point's top echelon was still unhappy with us, so they brought us up to the board room. Ed and I sat there in our old work clothes as they berated us about how much money they had lost and how late the ride was. Ed and I didn't say a thing; we just sat there. After a long silence, the president looked at me and asked, 'Hey, what have you boys got for me new for next year?'"
MAY 2014
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