A traveler has talked about the terrifying experience aboard the cruise ship Icon of the Seas, where a slide broke and “sliced open” a passenger.
The event took place on August 7 on Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, which has the record-breaking Thrill Island waterpark.
According to witnesses, the accident occurred on the largest drop slide at sea, the Frightening Bolt. It features a 360-degree loop, a trapdoor launch, and a 46-foot plunge.
Under the slide with her husband and 18-year-old son, Erica Hunt described what transpired to TODAY.com: We thought something had struck the ship. It was a loud pop.
They looked up and saw that a piece of the slide’s acrylic glass had broken. Crew workers scrambled to clean the area as water flowed through the jagged breach and splashed onto the deck below. Workers started to run frantically to clear people out, Hunt recalled.
She got even more scared when she saw that her 12-year-old son Elijah was in line for the trip. I ran right up the steps of that ride to look for my son.
“Don’t let anyone else down the ride, stop the ride, stop the ride,” she said. Jose Maldonado, Hunt’s husband, was worried that Elijah may “slip through the hole.”
She saw her son halfway up the stairs. He was confused but not hurt. Later, Elijah said he was fourth in line and saw the wounded rider, who was described as a man in his 40s, being met at the bottom and brought away in a wheelchair.
According to people who saw it, The Sun said that his leg and back were cut open very badly.
Royal Caribbean told ABC News that their staff took care of an adult visitor who got hurt when acrylic glass shattered off a water slide while the guest was going down it. The guest is getting help for his injuries. While an investigation is conducted, the water slide will not be open for the remainder of the sailing.
Safety crews inspected the fiberglass-reinforced structure designed by Wiegand Waterrides while the slide area on Deck 15 was blocked.
Pictures from the site show the big hole where the panel broke.
Hunt’s kids had previously been on the slide several times earlier in the trip, but now they won’t go on any water rides for the rest of the ship. She was also upset because Royal Caribbean never contacted her or made any announcements about the slide or the person who was hurt subsequently.
Not all of the passengers agreed with her. Marianne Karlsen, another cruiser, told TODAY.com that the staff was kind when they turned people away and offered them the information they could at the time. She said, “They handled it very well.”
Hunt’s first Royal Caribbean trip in years was this one, which left Miami on August 2 and is slated to return on August 9. He had been sailing with Disney for years.
The ship’s reputation was one of the reasons she booked it. The Icon of the Seas has 20 decks and is 1,198 feet long. Up to 7,600 people can fit inside.
The Frightening Bolt accident is just the most recent in a series of scary things that have happened on the ship.
Two weeks before this, a 35-year-old crew member was said to have attacked a coworker and then jumped overboard to his de@th. A few days later, a guest fell from the deck of an infinity pool while grabbing for his sunglasses but fortunately walked away unharmed.
When the slide broke, Hunt’s 90-year-old grandmother was at the casino celebrating her birthday. “All of these slides don’t belong on a boat,” she stated fairly simply. When I moved from Italy, we had to sit on the floor of a boat that had no chairs.
When or not the Frightening Bolt will reopen has not been announced by Royal Caribbean.