Footage shows the moment two children were left dangling upside down on a fairground ride for 15 minutes.
Their mum, Ally Metzger, could only stand by and watch in horror as her eight and 11-year-old hung upside down at the X Drive Carnival Ride at Arkansas State Fair on Saturday.
She said her daughter appeared to pass out as fair employees rushed to the scene to try and fix the ride.
Ally told KATV: ‘I couldn’t see her. Her eyes were closed. She told me when she came home that she only remembered crying, and then, like, just got dizzy.
‘Her legs were hurting. I guess because the circulation was out.
‘There’s a bunch of people trying to get the ride to spin, and they would get it almost halfway down…then it would go right back up to the very top, with my kids still upside down. So, I’m panicking. My partner’s panicking.’
She said the children have been left traumatised by the incident and were eventually rescued by staff.
Ally vented her frustration on Facebook following the incident and said a staff member called Chris told her to calm down while her children were in the air.
She wrote: ‘My kids were stuck upside down for at least 15 minutes and seven workers couldn’t even get them down.
‘How do you build rides and not know how to successfully remove people when it shuts down?’
‘Oh and special shout to the dummy Chris who told us to “calm down it’s only been 4 1/2 minutes.” After what was spent to get in this place? RUN ME MY REFUND.
‘I remember why I don’t come here.’
She’s now got a full refund after filing a complaint against the fair.
Scooter Korek, an employee for the owner of the fair, said the ride stopped working after ‘the right computer received a fault.’
He said: ‘What it does is when it finds something that it doesn’t like, it shuts it down.
‘So, the ride was in the air, not in its landing position, for about 10-12 minutes.’
He said that everybody was evacuated ‘according to the manufacturer’s specification in the manual,’ and employees train for that ‘all the time’.
He continued: ‘We have a safety director and the Arkansas State Fair ride inspectors. We have the supervisors. They’re looking at these rides.
‘They travel with us wherever we go.’
He added the company has ‘third-party periodic inspections’ that take place and said the ‘most important’ aspect is the employees who run the rides and added that they must pass five safety inspection levels.
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