Shakopee, Minnesota - Visitors to Valleyfair in Shakopee, Minnesota got an interesting end to their day Tuesday evening. This past week, the park suffered from a total power outage, immediately shutting down all rides. This caused many guests to become temporarily stranded on many of the rides and forced an early closure for the park.

According to KARE 11’s report, Xcel Energy said that the power outage occurred around 4:30 p.m. Guests were stranded on all sorts of rides, ranging from the Ferris Wheel to the massive steel Wild Thing roller coaster. The news source reported that guests on several rides, including Wild Thing, had to be evacuated and walked down to safety after the rides stopped as a failsafe. A backup generator was turned on to move the Ferris Wheel so guests on that ride could also be evacuated, according to the StarTribune. No injuries were reported.

The outage occurred due to an equipment failure, but Xcel Energy crews had power restored about an hour and a half later, around 6:00 p.m. At that point though, park officials had already closed the park down for the night not knowing how long things would be shut down, and also needing to go back through test runs and safety checks following the outage.

Some, including 18 year old Sydney Ellerbe and her 10 friends, waited an hour and a half to get refunds for their tickets after the park shut down early. They made the trip down from Wisconsin to spend a day at the park and were “annoyed” at the inconvenience. The group received what amounted to approximately a half-refund after their efforts.

Valleyfair returned to normal operation at its standard 10 a.m. opening time Wednesday morning.