They Were Stuck at the Top of the Ferris Wheel When the Storm Wall Hit. Then the Whole Wheel Started to Lean
An Iowa county fair derecho story: a mom and daughter were stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel as a storm wall hit and the steel frame began to lean.
On this page
For Paige Hansen, 17, the county fair was the best week of every Iowa summer: corn dogs, the livestock barns, the demolition derby, and one last ride on the big Ferris wheel at sunset with her mom. This year, that last ride turned into fifteen minutes she says she still relives every time the sky turns green.
The Sky Turned Green
Paige and her mother, Carrie, 42, climbed into a gondola late in the afternoon. The air was heavy and strangely still. Paige noticed the sky to the west had gone a deep, eerie shade of green, but the fair was still packed and the rides were still running. Nobody had announced anything.
As their gondola reached the very top, the wheel jerked to a stop. Paige pulled out her phone to film the view. That is when she saw it.
The Wall
Across the cornfields, stretching from one side of the horizon to the other, a massive black wall of cloud was rolling straight toward the fairgrounds. In front of it, a boiling brown curtain of dust and debris was tearing across the fields. It looked, Paige said, “like the edge of the world was coming at us.”
It was a derecho, a fast-moving line of violent windstorms that can produce gusts over one hundred miles per hour, as strong as a tornado but spread across many miles. Iowa has been hit by some of the most destructive derechos in American history.
The Wind Hit
On her video, you can hear the carnival music still playing when the first gust slams into the wheel. The gondola swings violently forward and back. Carrie grabs Paige’s arm with both hands. Down below, tents are ripping loose from their stakes and flying across the midway. People are running in every direction.
The music warps, slows, and dies as the power goes out.
The Wheel Began to Lean
Paige pointed her camera down through the bars. The operator’s booth at the base of the wheel was empty. And the huge steel frame was groaning, a deep metal sound she could feel through the seat. Slowly, the entire wheel was starting to lean.
“Hold the bar!” her mother screamed. “Don’t let go!”
That is the last thing on the video.
Fifteen Minutes at the Top
The worst of the wind lasted about fifteen minutes. Paige and Carrie stayed locked in the gondola, holding the bar and each other, while debris flew past them and the wheel swayed. Carrie kept talking the entire time, telling Paige stories about Paige as a baby, about her grandparents, about anything at all, just to keep her daughter from looking down.
At one point, a piece of sheet metal from a food stand flew past them close enough that Paige felt the air move.
Who Got Them Down
The operator had not abandoned them. When the power failed, he had run to the backup generator behind the ride, fighting the wind the entire way. After the gusts eased, he restarted the wheel by hand-cranking it, one gondola at a time. Inspectors later found that two of the wheel’s anchor bolts had sheared, which is why the frame had shifted. The rest had held.
Paige and Carrie were the last ones off. When their gondola reached the ground, the operator, a man in his sixties named Dale, was crying. He had been running that wheel at the fair for twenty-two years.
The Damage
The storm damaged dozens of buildings at the fairgrounds, flattened several barns, and knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes across the county. Remarkably, no one at the fair was killed, though several people were treated for injuries from flying debris.
The Moment That Stays With Her
Paige says the scariest part was not the wind itself, but a moment near the end when the gondola next to theirs flipped almost upside down on its hinge. A man inside was clinging to the safety bar with both arms, his feet dangling. She watched him hang there for what felt like a full minute before the gondola swung back level. He waved at her afterward, shaking, and she waved back.
Carrie says she has no memory of most of what she said during those fifteen minutes. “I just knew that if I stopped talking, she would start screaming,” she said. “So I didn’t stop.”
What Paige Wants People to Know
Paige’s video has been shared by weather enthusiasts across the country as an example of how fast a derecho can arrive and how deceptive a calm, green sky can be. Meteorologists say a green-tinted sky ahead of a storm can be a sign of a very tall, intense storm system.
“Everyone thought it was just a thunderstorm,” Paige said. “If you see the sky go green like that, don’t get on a ride. Get inside.” She still goes to the fair every summer. She has not been back on the Ferris wheel.
