Rescue workers gingerly scaling the ladders and spokes of the Singapore Flyer; stranded passengers winched down in safety harnesses an inch at a time.
If the stalled Flyer did not resume operation, it would have taken till today morning to rescue all 173 passengers.
Singapore Flyer general manger Steven Yeo said in a New Paper report that it would take about 30 minutes to rescue one person, and they had no idea how long the repairs would take to allow the wheel to start turning again.
The world’s highest observation wheel grounded to a halt at 4.50 pm yesterday, leaving 173 passengers – comprising locals and tourists – stranded for up to seven hours.
Thankfully the wheel started turning again at around 11pm, and only ten people were rescued through the ‘rappelling’ rescue measures, which commenced at around 7.30pm, reported The New Paper.
The ordeal may have passed but comments and criticisms are rife about whether the incident was properly handled by the Singapore Flyer management.
Many on local internet forums accepted that rare technical faults were permissible on such a complexly engineered observation wheel.
However many lamented the ‘rappelling’ rescue method employed.
“I find it quite strange to have such dangerous rescue action that is uncalled for. There is no danger like the past case of cable snap for cable car service to Sentosa,” said AsiaOne forum poster ycleong.
“This is only pure functional failure. Re-assurance effort should be taken to calm down flight visitors and to bring them food and water via the maintenance routes on the Flyer; while expediting the repair and recovery works to resume operations,” he added.
“It is definitely a very poor engineering and safety design, why not back-up power to bring it down manually. Someone should re-look at the overall features again”, said user MacZZ.
Straitstimes.com forum user panasonicvista, who claimed to be one of the stranded passengers, said “crisis management skills were extremely poor”.
“There was no honesty, they refused to talk to us on several occasions on the PA system and when we got down the bottom, they were 100% concerned about getting us away from the media and not about telling us what happened.”
“All we needed was for them to say ‘Apologies, we are going to evacuate the people on the bottom first, however due to safety reasons, it is likely you will be up there for several more hours.’
“Instead, they asked - how many tourists are there in your cabin?” added panasonicvista.
A Straits Times report also said that passengers demanded to know what was happening when the wheel was stuck but they said information was not forthcoming from the Flyer staff.
