WILDWOOD – The Giant Wheel at Morey’s Piers is gone from the island’s skyline.
Temporarily.
The wheel’s hub, the anchor that holds the wheel together and is the point around which the wheel rotates, was trucked to the Philadelphia Navy Yard late in the evening on Thursday, Nov. 8, for refurbishing.
The 16,000-pound hub was placed into a custom-built cradle and loaded onto a flatbed truck for delivery to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The spokes and gondolas will remain in Wildwood during the refurbishment process.
Megan Lonergan, marketing coordinator for Morey’s Piers, said the company hired to disassemble the wheel was Global Leisure Services, of Switzerland. The Morey’s maintenance team assisted, spending a week removing all the lights and gondolas from the wheel.
Chalmers and Kubek, an industrial repair and maintenance group, will refurbish the wheel hub in Philadelphia. Lonergan said that is the same group that performed the hub’s last refurbishment, in 1999.
The entire project is expected to cost more than $1.5 million.
While the hub is being refurbished, a Morey’s crew of five to six maintenance workers will perform inspections and will sandblast and paint the wheel’s spokes. Global Leisure Services will return to reassemble the wheel when work on the hub is completed, which will take two to three weeks. Lonergan said Morey’s team of about four to five employees will put the lights and gondolas back on at the very end of the project. The state will come in for final inspections, she said.
Lonergan said being located right along the Atlantic Ocean is both a privilege and a challenge, meaning Morey’s rides and structures are constantly exposed to elements that accelerate wear and corrosion: salt air, sea breezes and moisture.
“It’s a constant battle against nature, but one that our team takes seriously and approaches with care,” she said.
She said the maintenance and facilities teams work year-round to inspect, restore and protect every attraction, so that everything meets the highest standards of safety and appearance. The refurbishment of the hub, she said, ensures the continued safe and reliable operation of the Giant Wheel.
Most wheels of this sort are simply referred to by the generic name “Ferris wheel,” which comes from its first maker, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., who created one for Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition, more commonly known as the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893.
At Morey’s, they refer to the 140-foot-diameter wheel as the Giant Wheel, the product name from its manufacturer, Vekoma, a Dutch company with U.S. operations based in Orlando, Florida. Vekoma also manufactured the Sea Serpent and Great Nor’easter roller coasters, Lonergan said.
“The Giant Wheel was Vekoma’s product name, and we decided to keep it named as that because at the time it was one of the tallest Ferris wheels on the East Coast,” Lonergan said.
Over the past few years, large-scale refurbishments of Morey’s rides were done, including the Great White, a wooden roller coaster. Morey’s added new trains and performed track rework on that ride last winter. In 2018, Morey’s retracked the Great Nor’Easter.
Contact the reporter, Christopher South, at csouth@cmcherald.com or call 609-886-8600, ext. 128.
