59°F
weather icon Clear

High Roller shut for 1½ hours, stranding 150 passengers

Updated September 23, 2021 - 5:50 pm

The High Roller at The Linq came to a halt last Friday night, leaving some 150 people stranded for about 90 minutes on the giant observation wheel.

“The High Roller Observation Wheel was stopped during its rotation on Friday night, due to a network connectivity issue involving one of the cabins,” a Caesars Entertainment spokesperson said. “Approximately 150 passengers were aboard the wheel at the time. Engineers resolved the network issue within approximately 90 minutes, the wheel’s rotation resumed, and all passengers safely disembarked and received refunds.”

The Clark County Fire Department later responded to the area but didn’t need to conduct a rescue because the issue was resolved by maintenance workers.

“They were getting ready to do a rescue but a maintenance guy did a reset and it released the clutch so the pods leveled out.” Clark County Deputy Fire Chief Warren Whitney said. “They brought the pods down and evacuated all of them one at a time.”

The last time the High Roller had an unplanned stop was April 16, 2016, when at 2:25 a.m. one of the control boards malfunctioned in a cabin, causing the ride to automatically stop, according to an incident report from Caesars.

“It would have been a really unsafe rescue procedure to override the cabin system and move the Wheel, because the cabin would have started tilting,” investigators wrote in the report, which is maintained by Clark County.

The cabin was rebooted, and the 10 guests riding were evacuated from the pod about 90 minutes later. The control system in the cabin was replaced as a result, according to the incident report.

Information regarding the latest incident is expected to be made available in the coming weeks.

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan@reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter. Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.

Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook.
THE LATEST