Disneyland Guest Captures 'Chaos' as Parade Float Catches Fire: 'Smoke Everywhere' (Exclusive) Colson ThayerSeptember 12, 2025 at 11:57 PM 8 Courtesy of Jessica Fain A Disneyland float reportedly caught fire during the Paint the Night parade on Wednesday night Eyewitness Jessica Fain spoke to PEOPLE...
- - Disneyland Guest Captures 'Chaos' as Parade Float Catches Fire: 'Smoke Everywhere' (Exclusive)
Colson ThayerSeptember 12, 2025 at 11:57 PM
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Courtesy of Jessica Fain
A Disneyland float reportedly caught fire during the Paint the Night parade on Wednesday night
Eyewitness Jessica Fain spoke to PEOPLE and described the scene at the Anaheim, Calif. theme park
"I was very impressed about how the Cast Members handled the situation," she says
A Disneyland guest is describing the moment a parade float reportedly caught fire and sent smoke billowing out across Main Street, U.S.A.
Atlanta resident Jessica Fain and her husband were visiting Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, Calif. on Wednesday, Sept. 10. In the evening, Fain stood at the end of Main Street waiting for the Paint the Night parade to begin around 8:30 p.m. Her husband, however, was at the back of the park riding various attractions.
Sean Teegarden/Disneyland Resort
Fain recalls watching the parade as it began to 'stall' and a large gap formed in between the floats. After trying to determine what the hold up could be, she says she saw the "Under the Sea" — The Little Mermaid float being pulled by a tractor-like vehicle.
"There were no lights on, so we figured the lights had gone out or something," Fain tells PEOPLE of the highly decorated float. "Then all of the sudden, there was smoke everywhere and you saw the guy driving the tractor with the float jump out and he ran around with a fire extinguisher."
She adds: "People were just running everywhere."
Although Fain didn't catch any flames in her TikTok video of the incident, she says several other guests told her a fire was visible from other angles.
"There were kids yelling and screaming," Fain describes. "That's a scary thing to see. Disney is kind of always our safe space, our happy place and you don't usually think of bad things happening."
Luckily, cast members quickly jumped in to help usher crowds to safety.
"I was very impressed about how the cast members handled the situation," she says. "When you have that many thousands of people crammed in such a small area and they just stared like running and going wild and just chaos. . . they were really able to wrangle everybody and get everybody out of the area in [an] orderly — well, as best as they could — an orderly fashion."
Courtesy of Jessica Fain
According to Fain, the float was pulled in front of her and the rest of her reserved section around 8:45 p.m. local time. Fain approximates the incident lasted about seven to 10 minutes before she felt safe again, but the ordeal felt like "hours."
The Paint the Night parade typically takes place twice each evening, but on Wednesday night, the second parade was cancelled.
Fain later chatted with a cast member who she says explained the float began experiencing issues around the Matterhorn Bobsled attraction.
The following day, Fain and her husband traveled back to Disneyland and rewatched the parade. During the later performance, they witnessed the return of The Little Mermaid float.
Bryan Smith/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
"[We] ended up watching the second parade from a different viewpoint just to kind of see if we could see any of the damage," she says. "We could not find anything."
She adds: "That was a very, very quick turnaround. I don't know if they have a spare."
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Despite the incident, it won't change Fain's views on the park.
"I think that [they] handled it in the best way that they possibly could," she says. "Crazy things happen everywhere these days and I think if it had not been handled the way that it was handled, it could have been a lot worse."
A representative for Disneyland did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.
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