Nov. 3 (UPI) — Two young girls were in intensive care at a hospital after they were thrown from a Ferris wheel at a festival near Baton Rouge, La.
The girls, both under 13 years old, around noon Saturday were ejected from the ride’s basket while it was rotating and they fell 20 feet onto a steel platform in New Roads, which is part of Pointe Coupee Parish, about 40 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. A third girl clung to the basket and was rescued.
WAFB-TV reported one girl has a possible brain bleed and the other has broken bones. They were taken to the Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, NBC News reported.
Sheriff Rene Thibodeaux told NBC News that the girls were sitting in the basket when it tipped over.
“As it was going around, it was just, like, stuck at an angle and they flipped out of it,” Ronald Brasseaux, who witnessed the incident, told WAFB-TV.
He said he felt unsafe riding the same ferris wheel the previous day.
“They need to take this thing down,” he told the TV station.
Brasseaux said he believes the basket’s hinges might have gotten stuck.
The ride didn’t have any restraints.
“I feel like it should be seatbelts on there, because, mind you, it’s just a gate on there, like somebody can easily fall out, a child can easily just open the gate and then step out,” witness Madison Fields told WBRZ-TV.
Another visitor, Eddie Jones, told WAFB: “We were in line to buy tickets to the Ferris wheel, and I heard a girl scream, and I looked over, and the Ferris wheel car was kicked over. I don’t know how it got in that position, but it was stuck. Yeah, I’ll probably never get on another Ferris wheel.”
He posted video of the accident on Facebook.
The ride and another one nearby were closed to the public amid an investigation.
The state’s fire marshal’s office is required to perform safety checks on rides and attractions.
The Ferris wheel is operated by Crescent City Amusements, based in Slidell, La.
In 2023, a ride operated by the company, the Ring of Fire, stranded riders upside-down for more than three hours in northeastern Wisconsin. An investigation found a lighting transformer lodged into the track.
The Ferris wheel was part of the annual Harvest Festival, which supports the local agriculture-based community,” according to its website. It ran from Friday through Sunday on False River.
The Ferris wheel is named after its inventor, civil engineer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., who designed the ride for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.