Durban - About 24 people who attended the Royal Show in Pietermaritzburg were stuck on a ride due to a municipal power outage on Friday night.
Videos of the incident were shared on social media. Some revellers, who spoke to The Mercury yesterday, described how they had faced anxious moments as the ride was attended to.
Thandi Dlamini said she took her family out to the show. “We were enjoying the ride when there was a huge bump and our ride froze in the air. We could not understand what was going on until others on the ground screamed ‘load shedding’,” she said.
Joe Naidoo said that the way the ride stopped, they had been stuck at the top of it, and his son had been left traumatised.
“This was our first time at the event since the Covid-19 pandemic. We did not expect this to happen, it was really a traumatic experience. It felt like we were in the air forever,” he said.
Terry Strachan, the CEO of the Royal Agricultural Society, said the ride did not have any faults and that it had stopped due to a power outage. He said the incident took place on Friday at 6pm.
“A 15-minute power outage, on the part of the City, not the Royal Showgrounds” had led to the incident, Strachan said.
He said 24 people had been on the ride and were in the air for about 15 minutes. He added that there were no injuries reported and the situation was corrected manually.
The Msunduzi Municipality had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
