Water Park Ride Incident Collapses: Manager Says Visitors On Eid Holiday Reaches 1,000 People, Overload

BPBD officers inspect the collapsed water park in Surabaya/ Photo: Antara

JAKARTA - A total of 16 visitors to the Kenjeran Water Park (Kenpark) Kenjeran, Surabaya City, East Java, were injured. Meanwhile, the manager of the local ride gave an explanation regarding the incident.

Head of HRD Waterpark Kenjeran Bambang Irianto said that his party always routinely performs vehicle maintenance. According to Bambang, the last treatment was carried out nine months earlier.

"The condition of the vehicle is actually still decent, so it is suspected that the cause of the slide to collapse was overloaded," he said.

Still said Bambang, during normal conditions visitors can reach 300-400 people. Meanwhile, under special conditions such as the current Idul Fitri holiday, visitors can reach more than 1,000 people.

He also stated that every ride has an officer on duty, both the rides below and above.

"But on average, if you want to go down together, you don't want one at a time. Well, this might cause the overload to collapse," he said.

According to Bambang, the maximum slide capacity is only for 5-10 people, while at the time of the incident, the number of people sliding exceeded the capacity.

"There should be 5-10 people below waiting, 5-10 sliding down, only 5-10 below going up again. But I don't know how it was, maybe an 'error', so it happened like that," he said.

To find out the cause of the incident because of "human error" or what, he continued, the manager worked closely with the local police to conduct an investigation.

For investigation purposes, Bambang stated that Kenpark will be temporarily closed starting Sunday, May 8.

Based on information from the Surabaya City Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD), the connection to the water slide at the Kenpark swimming pool suddenly collapsed and fell down at around 13.30 WIB.

At the time of the collapse, many visitors played on the rides so that some of the visitors fell from the slide that collapsed from a height of 10 meters. It is suspected that the cause of the slide joint collapsing was due to weathering.