The two teenage girls remember the 360-degree swinging pendulum known as the AtmosFEAR ride coming to an abrupt stop upside-down at Southeast Portland’s Oaks Amusement Park in June 2024.
Next, they say an all-consuming terror set in over the 25 minutes it took for rescuers to free them.
Xitlali Gomez-Salais and Evie Yannotta, then 13- and 14-year-olds celebrating their eighth grade graduations from two different Portland-area schools, say they remember the overwhelming pain of blood pooling in their heads, the vomit from other riders periodically falling to the ground and the extreme fear that the shoulder harnesses that were holding them in might suddenly give way and they’d plummet 100 feet to their deaths…