OK, here's the story as it was related to me by the CM I know:
To set up the story:
In between the sections of the attraction there are large doors used for soundproofing. They're about 18" thick, and rather than raise (and have all that weight suspended above Guests riding underneath), they sink into the floor. When they're in the "down" position, the top of the door is flush with the floor and the ride vehicles roll right across the top of them. This incident involves Door A, which separates Theater 1 from the diorama. Once the cars are fully in the diorama (while still in the 6-pack configuration) this door rises silently behind you.
When the attraction breaks down, they have to reposition both sets of vehicles to the turntables before starting back up again. They evacuate the Guests before doing anything, unless the vehicles have pulled into the single-file portion of the diorama. In that section, it's safer to move the vehicles forward to the next turntable before evacuation. When resetting the vehicles, they put the attraction in a manual maintenance mode. In this mode, every function of the attraction can be controlled individually... Vehicles, doors, screens, curtains, etc.
On this day, the attraction went 101 sometime in the morning as one set of cars was leaving Theater 1 and pulling into the diorama. Guests were evacuated and Maintenance started the reset operation.
The problem was that when the ride broke down, the vehicles hadn't finished pulling into the diorama yet. So two vehicles were on top of the door. A CM hit the button to raise the door before the vehicles had been moved. The door started to rise, and lifted the back ends of the two vehicles off the ground. They got pretty high up before the flustered CM was able to E-stop the doors. I'm sure this bent part of the chassis on the vehicles, as they're not designed to support all the weight on the front end.
Then came the issue of trying to figure out how to get them back down. They didn't want to re-engage the power to the doors, because they didn't know what would happen. So they decided to bleed the hydraulic fluid out of the doors' pistons and let them sink back down to their lowered position.
This is where the REAL problem started. The doors themselves are really in two sections. It's not one giant door. So one vehicle was entirely on one section, and the other was straddling both sections. When they opened the valves to lower the doors, one door went down much faster because it had more weight on it. So as the one door got lower than the other, the vehicle straddling them tipped sideways, and the top corner of the higher door poked into the bottom of the vehicle. At one point the weight shifted and the vehicle fell slightly, and the corner of the door scraped along the bottom. That vehicle was out of commission the entire summer. There's only room for one vehicle in the maintenance bay, so while that was taking up all the space being repaired and rebuilt, all regular maintenance on the other vehicles had to be done out in the show areas.
To make matters worse, in raising and lowering the doors with all this extra weight they bent some part of the guiderails or other mechanism within the doors, and they wouldn't operate properly. So for a number of weeks they had to leave the doors in the "down" position and there was only a curtain separating Theater 1 from the diorama. They lowered the lights and sound levels in the diorama, but it was still very noticable to the Guests riding in from Theater 2 and for Guests loading onto the attraction.
-Rob
