Kings Dominion has announced Volcano: The Blast Coaster will be closed for good and removed.
The amusement park announced on their official blog that the inverted roller coaster is being removed from the park in 2019. The park says ahead of every season, each ride is thoroughly inspected and evaluated, and with that Kings Dominion made the difficult decision to shut down Volcano for good.
When Volcano opened in 1998 at a reported cost of $20M, it was the first inverted roller coaster to feature a Linear Induction Motor, which propelled it out of the top of the mountain. Until 2013, it also claimed the honor of having the highest inversion off the ground at 155'.
The roller coaster was designed in and around the large mountain originally called "The Lost World" which was originally built in 1979 and hosted three attractions. The mountain was renamed "Smurf Mountain" in 1984 but was shut down in 1995 before Volcano took over three years later.
The coaster was down for a good part of 2018 while emergency repair work was being done to the ride, and perhaps the park decided to shut down Volcano due to waning popularity and reliability issues. A new hybrid roller coaster called Twisted Timbers opened in Kings Dominion in 2018. No word on whether or not the mountain feature will be removed with the roller coaster or if it will be used for a new attraction.
Photo Credit: Coasterman1234/Wikimedia Commons