Surreal, sad postscript to the Hersheypark visit

[mmcirvin]

Lots of places we visited on our summer road trip are now experiencing flooding, ranging from big puddles to downtowns entirely flooded out with many feet of water.

Here's Hersheypark. The Trailblazer and Dry Gulch Railroad are clearly not so much dry as submerged. The area around Comet Hollow where I struggled to get information about the Virginia quake is now the bottom of a lake.

The saddest detail: Hersheypark has a "ZooAmerica" area that we didn't get around to visiting (though I remember seeing it when I was a kid). While they managed to evacuate nearly all of the animals in time, there was a sudden flash flood that threatened to drown the park's two bison before they could possibly be gotten out of their pen, and they decided to shoot the bison instead. There seems to be a lot of outrage and second-guessing going around about this; I'm personally doubtful about whether amusement parks should really be running zoos at all, but the one at Hersheypark is at least accredited, and it sounds as if they were genuinely caught flat-footed by the speed of the rising water and had no time to do anything else.

As for the roller coasters, I'm sure they'll be all right; I know that even old woodies have been completely submerged and come out intact. It sounds like it might take a while to clean up, though. I heard Knoebels got hit pretty hard too.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I emailed my sister those links, and on the topic of the bison, she (with about a decade of Veterinary experience and some schoolin' on the topic) concurred with the decision to euthanize the bison. She mentioned that there are manuals for this sort of thing, the precise location and angle for shooting the brain stem of the critter so it doesn't feel a thing.

She also has had firsthand contact with a lot of large-animal DVMs and she knows the type pretty well-- they certainly don't put animals down lightly. (It also means I have a great photo of her, gloved up to her shoulder, after she was the 5th person in her class to palpate the same cow's rectum-- the cow had a case of clumsy-student-induced IBS and had what she termed a "blowout," all over her chest and neck. Priceless!)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

More recent reports have stated that one of the bison actually drowned before they could even euthanize it. There were sites that had more pictures, but I didn't particularly feel like linking to the ones that actually showed a hoof sticking up out of the water.

(And I'm speaking as someone who personally finds bison highly delicious.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've heard that of the coasters, the Trailblazer was probably hardest hit by the flood, in that the coaster's trains were actually submerged, and they'll have to disassemble the cars completely and clean up every individual part. It sounds like it'll be out of commission for quite a while even if most of the park reopens for the remaining fall weekends. I'm glad Jorie got her chance to ride it first.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...wow, they're actually opening this weekend. That's a fast turnaround! (And they claim the sooperdooperLooper and Tidal Force are the only rides still down from the flood; I guess they got the Trailblazer back up.)