Mindbender is the name of the huge rollercoaster at WEM. From what I founded on it:
Its a creation of the best rollercoaster designer, a german called Anton Schwarzkopf. He designed lots and lots of rollercoasters all over the world. He's famous for smooth and powerful rides!
Mindbender pulls a mighty 5,9-6,2 G's, the rollercoaster operating in the world with the most G's (another creation of Mr. Schwarzkopf in Houston, Texas pulls 6'7 G's! But, its been closed for a while for a while, due to the new restraints the park putted on it. Its opened for a few hours last year with those restraints, then closed. Its hasn't been open since.)
The accident you were refering about was caused by a few factors putted together:
- The operating manual was never translated from german to english
- The maintenance crew only relied on "visual" inspections of the ride.
What happened was that the axle of a car broke... flinging the car off track. In a tragic turn of events, the car restraints (a lap bar per rider) opened and... I'll spare the details.
Interestingly, the management of the place blamed it all on the designer, turning a blind eye on the faulty maintenance of the ride..
To make it "safer", they modified each train, so they have a shoulder restraint (a pair of bars that comes on the shoulders, in addition to the lap bar) and modified each train so they have 3 cars instead of 4. Now, these 3 cars are composed of "lead car", that have 2 axles (the original train was composed of one 2 axle car and 3 trailered 1 axle cars).
So, there you go, a small history of the ride.
P.S. To show you how safe the rides of this designer are under normal operation (good maintenance, etc.), in 1997 or 1998, a train was stuck on a Schwarzkopf rollercoaste... upside down. The train had the original restraints, the lap bars and even if the riders were stuck 2 hours upside down... nobody fell down or were injured. The train was stuck in a one out of billions thing (the launch malfunctioned and didn't accelerate the train enough). If the train whould have a few inches more on either side... its whould have rolled out, but fate decided otherwise!