Operations issues 7/16?

Hi everyone,

I had some observations and questions about my visit to both CP and Soak City today that I'm hoping someone can answer,

I noticed many attractions not up and running today, which was surprising given the crowd levels. The one kids area at SC was not open the entire day and at one point they told us we had to get out of the "Mainstream" lazy river with no reason given, just that they were shutting it down. In CP, I noticed a sign saying Dragster would be closing its line at 9pm. Also quite a bit of downtime for many of the rides today (Wicked Twister, Millennium, Dragster, and Magnum); especially the last two, which over the course of the day seemed to be going down every hour, at least from our viewpoint at SC). Are the extremely high temperatures/heat index what caused any of these issues today or is it just normal maintenance issues?

My other observation/question (which relates somewhat to the above) is why were many ride ops getting moved around today? I have read on here that ride ops will be sent around to fill in at other rides occasionally but I didn't know if today was normal ops. Is it possible a larger then normal amount of employees have quit or called in sick? For example, I noticed a ride op (who I think is the TL of Millenium- he has a blue tag) working on Magnum, and also noticed one of the foreign ride ops working Millennium this morning versus Dragster where we have seen him in the past, then later in the evening he was working Windseeker! There were quite a few others as well, but those are the ones that stood out, especially if a TL was working another ride- not sure how common that is. We just weren't sure if this was normal or if something was going on at the park. We were thinking maybe this is why the one kids area of SC was not open, because of short staffing. It seemed ridiculous to not at least open the seating area after seeing how many people were on the grass under the slides and such.

Also, if no one has noticed, it appears on the main body slides they have installed a hose thing along the entire staircase with holes along the way which spray out water. While I must say it looks tacky being held up with tie-wraps, it is AWESOME that they finally have something to keep your feet from burning while waiting in the slide line.

It's not uncommon for a ride op to be trained on multiple rides and for you to see them working at different locations throughout the day/course of the season.

Interesting perspective... we spent the morning at Soak City and evening at Cedar Point that day. We don't do the big rides so I didn't notice most of the issues you spoke of. I saw that the Iron Dragon was closed (stuck on a hill) but other than that we had a perfect day!

Regarding the wave pool, I did see them cleaning up a mess (puke?) near there, but it could have been another sanitary issue. I know if someone gets sick in our rec pool they have to shut it down, dump a ton of chemicals and then open it again.