Arkansas State Fair ride leaves kids stuck upside down

LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — Ally Metzger recorded a cell phone video on Saturday afternoon at the Arkansas State Fair, showing her 11-year-old and 8-year-old kids stuck upside down on the X Drive Carnival Ride.

"There's a bunch of people trying to get the right 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," said Metzger.

She says it took crews at least 15 minutes to get her kids off the ride while they were upside down.

"So, I looked up my 11-year-old, and it looked like she had passed out. 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. So, they were upside down for 10 minutes, and someone told me to start recording," said Metzger.

The ride crew finally brought the kids down, but Metzger wanted to know how this happened.

KATV was able to speak with Metzger about the scary incident.

"The right computer received a fault. 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, said Scooter Korek.

"On Saturday afternoon, we evacuated everybody according to the manufacturer's specification in the manual and what we train for all the time."

Korek works for North American Midway Entertainment, which is responsible for all the rides and takes the show on the road to fairgoers all over the United States.

One question KATV asked him was if these rides were safe.

"Let me break it down to you in a nutshell. Any of my family members can go on any of our rides any day. That's how good I feel about our programs, our safety programs, and the people who work for us to operate and take care of these rides," said Korek.

He tells us their rides go through five levels of inspection.

"We have a safety director and the Arkansas State Fair ride inspectors. We have the supervisors. They're looking at these rides. We do third-party periodic inspections, and the most important is the guys running these rides. They travel with us wherever we go," said Korek.

But for Ally and her kids, it all boils down to this.

"We candidly talked about it, and they said I was scared. I didn't know what was happening. We had planned this weekend, but that jolted everything."