Guests were briefly evacuated from the typically calm and peaceful “it’s a small world” ride at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom on Wednesday, July 1, after a small fire sparked in one of the ride’s boats, a witness said.
A guest’s personal phone charger ignited and caught fire. Disney Cast Members – the company’s word for employees – quickly halted the ride, grabbed a fire extinguisher and put out the small fire.
Cast Members extinguished the fire before the fire department arrived, FOX 35 has been told, and no one was hurt.
People were evacuated from the ride and the queue line. The ride shut down, and reopened later that day, a spokesperson for Disney told FOX 35.
Kate Braggs is visiting Florida from Kilgore, Texas with her family and some friends.
“We rope-dropped Magic Kingdom yesterday, and we’re doing all the things, and we said, ‘hey, let’s go ride ‘small world,’ and the queue was a little bit more eventful than usual,'” she said.
She and her family had just gotten into the boat ride and were about to start when people in the boat in front of them suddenly got up. That’s when she spotted the small fire.
“Right when we sat down, that’s when everybody in front of us popped up real quick. Then we saw the quick fire – quick fire – and the smoke. And then everyone kind of parted, kind of like the ‘Red Sea.’ Some went back to the queue and some went to the exit way,” she said.
She said the fire wasn’t huge and commended Disney’s Cast Members, who remained “super calm and collected and did a really good job with all of that.”
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