OK Man Banned From Frontier City For Helping Stranded Riders

An Oklahoma man has been banned from Frontier City amusement park for five years after bringing water to stranded riders on the Wildcat roller coaster.

It had begun as just another fun-filled day at Oklahoma City's Frontier City amusement park until something went wrong with the old Wildcat roller coaster.

According to a story on News9.com, the coaster had been stopped mid cycle. William Curry Scott and his family, all season ticket holders, were on their way from one section of the park to another and saw the riders stranded on the ascent phase of the ride. It was pretty warm last Saturday (07.24.21), so Scott approached park staff and asked about getting some water to the stranded riders. He was told that the park didn't have anyone trained to do that. Scott then went and bought several bottles of water, loaded them into a backpack, hopped a small handrail fence and climbed the steps up to where the cars were stopped. Once there he handed the backpack to park personnel so they could hand them out to the riders.

Eventually two security guards came to escort the entire Scott family out of the park and Mr. Scott has now been banned from not only Frontier City, but any Six Flags theme park, for a period of five years. The rest of the family is not included in the ban.

In their defense, Frontier City sent a statement to News 9 that reads:

The safety of our guests and team members is always our highest priority. On Saturday evening the Wildcat roller coaster performed a safety shutdown while on the lift hill. As our maintenance team was preparing to restart the ride, a guest scaled a safety fence, jumped onto the ride’s catwalk, and climbed the lift hill. The actions of this guest were unsafe and unwarranted. Regardless of his intentions, our team had the situation under control and his actions put himself in danger, prompting our team to power the ride off and safely escort riders down. Guests who choose to ignore our rules and violate safety protocols are asked to immediately leave the park.

There are points to be made on both sides of this story. While Scott's intentions were good, he should not have climbed the walkway along the ride. There are very good reasons to keep non-authorized personnel away from the dangerous areas of rides. But from comments on social media it would seem that the ride had been stuck for some time and the park officials should have made some arrangement to get water to the riders.

The ride itself is an old-school wooden roller coaster that had been relocated to Frontier City from Fairyland Park in Kansas City back in 1991.

Being an older roller coaster it's pretty tame by today's standards and the cars were no doubt filled largely with children. It's no wonder that Scott wanted to do something to help.

I guess that old saying is true. "No good deed goes unpunished."

Scott says he'll take their punishment and never go back to Frontier City again.