Rob562
Well-Known Member
I am back at work and I already miss WDW!
- The ride is not technically considered a flume ride anymore because of the restrain bars, but a roller coaster. (As an aside this logic was confirmed by another CM at the Winne the Pooh ride who said that was also considered a roller coaster because of the restraint bars)
- They drain and walk the flume every night looking for defects. He (the DE) made it sound like this was SOP for all water rides in WDW.
- They can drain/fill SM in 20 mins with the pump system they have.
A few comments.
-Just because something has lapbars doesn't automatically classify it as a "roller coaster". The Snow White ride had lapbars, and it wasn't a coaster. A roller coaster is a coaster because it coasts, plain and simple. Pooh and Snow White are (were) dark rides: a powered vehicle making its way through an indoor ride. Splash is a flume ride with a very short section (the drop into the bee cave) that could very minimally be considered a "coaster portion".
-If they turn the pumps off, all of the water will naturally drain into the holding pool backstage. The water flow is entirely gravity driven, so the only thing the pumps do is to pump the water up to the top of the mountain where it flows back down. Turn the pumps off and the water level starts to drop almost instantly. Depending on the exact way the water flows (I'm not sure if the pumps send the water to only the highest point and it flows everywhere, or if each section is supplied independent of the others) the flume could be drained in 5 minutes or less.
But I'd definitely agree that filling it back up to a fully running status could take at least 20 minutes.
-Walking the drained flume nightly sounds like a valid SOP. That's when they retrieve anything that's fallen into the trough and didn't make its way to the reservoir backstage,
-Rob