Fantasyland 101

[BreakerVolant1081]

A little story from Paris... Bigger things have happened, but to me this one stands out simply because of the unlikely chain of events that even includes two stupid CM tricks...

A bit more than a month ago, one Friday afternoon there was a heavy thunderstorm raging here. Dumbo, Casey Jr. and Storybookland were closed almost right away because of the downpour.

Now, the roofs of the dark rides were under refurbishment at the time, and before leaving for the weekend the workers had apparantly forgotten to sufficiently protect some spots on the roof of the Snow White show building, just above the station part (that was the first stupid CM trick). So what happened was that three waterfalls started to form right there above the track, somehow causing a fire alarm in the entire building complex. Effectively, this put Snow White, Pinocchio and a restaurant out of service.

Once the complex was safely evacuated, one of the firemen wanted to make sure that the (false) alarm didn't turn into a real fire, and decided to pre-emptively unplug all electricity from Snow White. What he did instead was cut the electricity from nearly all of Fantasyland! I was just coming back on stage from my lunch break when all of a sudden the area music stopped and all the carousel lights went out... Fortunately, Snow White and Pinocchio were already evacuated, as it was pitch black in either. Getting guests out at that time would have been a real nightmare.

To cut a long story short, for several hours the only two Fantasyland rides running were Peter Pan and Small World... I had the "pleasure" of being greeter at Pinocchio and having to explain the situation to guests in as many languages as I could manage.

At least that's one to tell the new hires....