More on Steve Shiver Ghost Town at Maggie Valley: "Baby Oil" Keeps Former Miami Dade County Manager's Roller Coaster Running Smoothly ... by gimleteye

Back in January 2001, before the housing market bubble, before the housing market collapse, and as the Supreme Court was deciding a disastrous presidential election that turned on shutting down the recount in Miami-Dade County, Florida, the then mayor of Miami-Dade County Alex Penelas picked a small town mayor, Steve Shiver, to be the professional manager of one of the largest county governments in the nation.

Why Penelas decided in November 2000 to go to Spain "on business" instead of stop teams of Republican operatives who had parachuted into the Dade election's office from Washington DC, shutting down the recount, and why he picked a 37 year old political operative had to do with the first objective of Penelas' ever-so-brief moment in the national spotlight, but one that is rarely remarked upon.

That objective was to accommodate campaign contributors who planned to convert farmland in South Dade into suburban sprawl and use a former Air Force Base in Homestead as its catalyst. Those campaign contributors, from Hispanic (mainly) homebuilders were traditionally Republican: they had mastered how to spike the Bay of Pig tragedy to control the Cuban American bloc vote in Florida's largest and politically important county, through proxies on Spanish language radio fueled by hatred of Castro, and on the street money. The Clinton administration had promised the air base to Miami-Dade County to do with it what Penelas and his campaign contributors wanted but withheld support during the Gore campaign based on complicated environmental issues that had been unexpectedly elevated to national attention.

Shiver was close enough to the inner circle, including key operatives like Miguel De Grandy then of Greenberg Traurig, to understand his role: unrelenting pressure to get the deal done. He had no experience as a manager beyond running a small real estate business and throwing his weight in the last rural enclave of South Florida. His father had been the small town mayor, too, and tied up in local land development.

To that point in time, the big real estate plays in South Florida had been on Miami Beach and the Gold Coast, but it was much more expensive to build than on open farmland. The allure of fast profits building low cost, production housing in farmland was ever-so-stimulating of local political arrangements matching up to big money politics. What Shiver did for Penelas and his benefactors was to run point on the grand plan to prepare tens of thousands of acres of farmland for development.

In a large degree, the current national economic crisis is due to the failures of leadership that allowed politics to spread Miracle Gro zoning decisions, like those in Homestead, Florida.

At the time, Penelas responded to to criticism that Mr. Shiver — who has never worked in government administration — would be lost in the massive county government. He said, "They don't know Steve." Penelas never got the Homestead Air Force deal done. For the embarrassment of the 2000 election, his political career is over. Since 2001, South Dade transformed into a mess of suburban sprawl. In some ways, it was exactly what the Growth Machine wanted. In more ways, today's ghost town suburbs symbolize an era of greed that plunged the United States into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Shiver, who touted his knowledge of the "internet" and plans to radically change government to be more efficient and responsive to the public, now operates Ghost Town at Maggie Valley: a roller coaster theme park in western North Carolina that was intended to be another real estate deal until the markets collapsed. Earlier this year, the theme park shareholders declared bankruptcy with millions in debt and a trail of local vendors who have to roll the dice on Shiver.

“If it were easy everybody would be doing it,” the former county manager of Miami Dade County, Steve Shiver, explained to the Smoky Mountain Times last week, in response to the inadvertent closing of the much anticipated roller coaster at Ghost Town. Ghost Town picked up momentum in recent months, after the bad news of bankruptcy, issuing a press release that Dolly Parton's sister, Stella, is now scheduling entertainments of international importance at the theme park. From the Asheville to Waynseville, much is riding on the roller coaster. Unfortunately, after years of delay, it was grounded days after opening by state inspectors concerned for public safety.

The Times reports, "The state signed off on the final round of lengthy and arduous inspections Tuesday afternoon, but Brooks asked one of his inspectors to hang around and keep a close eye on the first couple of days of the ride’s operation." Shiver called the delay a matter of “fine-tuning”. In addition to brackets that might fail and cause riders fastened to their seats to fly off into the cool North Carolina summer air, there is also an issue of lubrication. The ride manufacturer "suggested switching to baby oil as a lubricant, which is applied to the wheels of the cars by hand every morning."

Please send your bottles of Baby Oil to:
The Maggie Valley Chamber of Commerce
Ghost Town Lubricant Fund
2961 Soco Road
Maggie Valley, NC 28751-9501


click 'read more', for the full article by the Smoky Mountain Times and our archive, "Shiver"


Ghost Town coaster an open-and-shut case
By Becky Johnson • Staff writer
The much-anticipated roller coaster at Ghost Town opened amid fanfare last week, then was promptly shut down again.

The coaster is one of the primary attractions at the mountaintop amusement park in Maggie Valley, but has been plagued by a series of glitches in the two years since the park opened under new ownership. The new owners pledged to breathe life into the 1960s-era amusement park, including rebuilding the coaster that had been shut down due to safety issues under the former owner.

The park hired a ride manufacturer to build an all-new roller coaster train that could run on the existing track. The new train has been slow to pass state ride inspections, however — from the type of harnesses it used to the way the cars rode on the track.

All those hurdles were finally cleared, however, and the coaster debuted to the public for a single day last Wednesday (July 1). By Thursday, it was shut down again.

The latest glitch involves the way the seat frames are bolted to the cars, according to Jonathan Brooks, head of the N.C. Elevator & Amusement Device Bureau. The seats will have to be taken apart and the connections analyzed — all the way down to which forge and which batch the steel came from, Brooks said.

Brooks said the ball is now in the ride manufacturer’s court to do an evaluation and come up with a fix.

“Until their engineers come back to us with a suitable solution to the problem, there is where we are,” Brooks said.

Ghost Town characterized the issue as “fine-tuning” in a press release sent out last Friday announcing the set back.

“The maintenance of a coaster is an ongoing and continual thing. This is just part of a process,” said CEO Steve Shiver. Indeed, a roller coaster at Carowinds was shut down by the state over the weekend due to concerns that arose there.

Shiver said the ball is already rolling on a new design for the seat brackets. If the new design is approved by the state, it should not take long to make the modifications to each seat.

Shiver said issues like this aren’t unusual and in fact are to be expected as part of the process in launching a new roller coaster.

“If it were easy everybody would be doing it,” Shiver said. “Some of it is trial and error, particularly given the uniqueness of our location and the logistics of being on top of this mountain. That’s why we are excited about having one of the most unique roller coasters in the world.”

How it was discovered

The state signed off on the final round of lengthy and arduous inspections Tuesday afternoon, but Brooks asked one of his inspectors to hang around and keep a close eye on the first couple of days of the ride’s operation.

“This being a brand new coaster, it is not unusual to have the inspector hang around and make sure the operations are running properly,” Brooks said.

In fact, ride inspectors make both surprise and announced inspections of all amusement parks and fairs in the state. Sometimes inspectors will pay the admission price at Carowinds and go in undercover as a tourist. Brooks said the repeated monitoring goes with the territory.

“You are taking people and turning them upside down and flipping them and spinning them, so there is a constant oversight that happens,” Brooks said.

The Cliffhanger roller coaster was open to the public all day on Wednesday. But Thursday morning, a Ghost Town ride operator detected something that didn’t seem quite right. He noticed what seemed to be abnormal movement of one of the seats in a car at the back of the train. The movement was most likely imperceptible to most, but not for an attuned ride operator.

“You get to know every little clink. They know when they see some abnormal movement,” Brooks said.

The ride operator in turn called the state inspector over who was still on the grounds. The inspector examined the seat fastenings, which wasn’t an easy task in itself.

“You have to get on your belly, standing on your head with a flashlight and mirror, to be honest,” Brooks said.

The inspector called Brooks and told him something didn’t look right in there. Brooks’ response: shut down the coaster and take the seat apart. The ride inspector found a hairline crack in the seat frame near the bolt that fastened it to the car.

“I took some heat for shutting it down, which I was willing to take. I don’t have an issue with that. My family may be on it and I certainly want it safe for my family, your family, everyone else,” Brooks said, reciting the rule of thumb behind his decisions.

Shiver said that while the setback is “absolutely frustrating” he, too, puts safety first.

“We want a safe and enjoyable experience for all our patrons,” Shiver said. “We have waited this long to open the coaster and because of our false starts in the past, we want to make sure that all of our theming and the complete Cliffhanger experience is satisfactory according to the high standards I personally set when we embarked upon the renovations and remaking of Ghost Town in the Sky.”

Inspection process works

The closure is a testimony to the state’s inspection system working properly, Brooks said. Brooks said his inspectors had been all over the roller coaster train examining every bolt and the crack wasn’t there. Brooks surmised it is a stress crack that developed during operation. It’s one reason the state requires a roller coaster to make 1,000 runs loaded with 170-pound sand bags in each seat before it can pass inspection.

The test runs not only familiarized ride operators with the coaster enough so they would detect any abnormality, but also meant the stress crack appeared early in the coaster’s debut while an inspector was still on site and not back in Raleigh already.

“We crossed all our T’s and dotted all our I’s,” Brooks said.

Shiver agreed.

“The process worked like it should,” Shiver said. “That’s why we have daily inspections and well-trained ride operators. It worked.”

Brooks’ expertise in ride operations helped the amusement park overcome a problem that had been stumping them for months. The roller coaster was repeatedly getting stuck on the track in certain places. The ride manufacturer, Rotational Motion, was unable to diagnose the problem that seemed potentially insurmountable without either rebuilding the cars or making serious alterations to the track itself.

Ghost Town had hired Brooks’ former counterpart with the state ride inspection bureau, Clyde Wagner. The two were on site at Ghost Town one day trying to troubleshoot the confounding problem.

“He and I were just talking one day and I said something ain’t square here,” Brooks recounted.

It turned out the neoprene wheels weren’t quite hard enough. Using an instrument to taking readings on the softness of the wheels, they tested the old wheels from the original roller coaster cars and discovered they were slightly harder than the ones on the rebuilt cars. New, harder wheels solved the problem.

There was another issue as well. The park has greased down the track with cooking oil. Lubricants aren’t uncommon to reduce friction since roller coasters operate on gravity.

The cooking oil left a residue, however, and sand sifting out of the bags placed in the seats during test runs had stuck to the track and even gotten in the bearings. Brooks had the maintenance crews strip the tracks of the build-up.

The ride manufacturer suggested switching to baby oil as a lubricant, which is applied to the wheels of the cars by hand every morning.

The Cliffhanger

Ghost Town’s Cliffhanger roller coaster is truly amazing. The track perches on the side of a 4,700-foot mountaintop, offering sweeping vistas of distance mountain ranges in every direction and the valley floor visible far below. See footage of the short-lived opening of the coaster filmed by a tourist, including footage of the ride from the front seat of the coaster train at www.ghosttowninthesky.com/Special/cliffhanger.html.