6/16/2023 0 Comments Camp cheerio zip line![]() But on this issue, the Y is also choosing not to answer any of those questions, which it surely can answer. I know the Y does great work throughout the Charlotte area, especially with children. What steps is the Y taking to make sure this doesn’t happen again?Ĭourteous but no answers: The Y’s PR team always responds promptly to us, and they are courteous and professional. Has there been an investigation, and if so, what were the results, and who conducted it? We have asked:ĭid staff members under age 18 ever work the zipline?ĭid the zipline conform to industry standards? Yet none of those shed much light on the basic question: What happened?Īnd the Y still refuses to answer the most basic and obvious questions. She sought incident reports from the volunteer fire department and the sheriff’s office. ![]() Michelle has reached out to counselors, campers and employees. We assigned a tenacious and experienced reporter, Michelle Crouch, to look into it. It has now been almost three months, and we’re no closer to knowing what happened that day on Camp Thunderbird’s zipline. But it said it would not divulge information about what happened in order to “respect the privacy of the camper and her family.” It said it had closed its ziplines while the incident was under review. To its credit, the Y that night confirmed the girl’s fall from the zipline. Within a few hours after I received that text from a friend, The Ledger’s Cristina Bolling, though her connections, tracked down a copy of an email the Y had sent to parents of campers on June 7 saying that “one of our campers experienced a fall from our zip line structure,” adding counseling was available and asking for prayers. Unfortunately, in this summer’s zipline fall at Camp Thunderbird, the YMCA of Greater Charlotte has been much less forthcoming than the YMCA of High Point, which runs Camp Cheerio. As a parent, those what-ifs stick with you: Could that have happened to my son or daughter? A few weeks earlier, at a family camp at Cheerio, my children had been on that same zipline. In 2015, at Camp Cheerio, a 12-year-old girl from Wilmington named Sanders Burney fell to her death from the camp’s zipline when the lines got tangled and cut the rope connected to her harness. ![]() And the news made me think of Camp Cheerio, a YMCA camp about two hours north of Charlotte. They’ve been to Y sleep-away camps and ridden the Y’s ziplines. I’m a parent whose children have taken advantage of the Y’s programs. I’m sharing this back-story with you to illuminate how we at The Ledger make decisions - and why having local reporters asking hard questions is vital to a community. That’s the genesis of several articles we have written at The Ledger over the last three months attempting to learn more information about what happened that day at Camp Thunderbird. He wanted to know if I had heard anything about that. I called him, and he said his wife had read on a South Carolina moms’ Facebook group that a girl had fallen from the zipline at YMCA’s Camp Thunderbird and was in the hospital with serious injuries. That’s the kind of message that piques a reporter’s interest - though I have learned over the years that sometimes people think they have big stories when they really don’t. On the afternoon of June 14, I got a text message from a longtime Charlotte friend: “Got a potential story for you. (Ledger file photo of summer campers at Camp Thunderbird.) The YMCA of Greater Charlotte refuses to give answers - but the story behind the story illustrates how The Ledger operates. The Ledger has been trying for nearly 3 months to learn more about how a 12-year-old girl fell from a zipline at Camp Thunderbird.
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