Seven Carowinds employees were taken to the hospital with minor injuries Saturday after something went wrong with a mechanism on the BORG Assimilator roller coaster, Carowinds spokesman Scott Anderson said Sunday.

Anderson said the employees were taken to Carolinas Medical Center as a precaution, and all were treated and released Saturday night. Most had only minor bumps and bruises, he said.

Today, workers are investigating what went wrong with the BORG Assimilator, the park's tallest coaster. The S.C. Department of Labor also will investigate. The theme park is scheduled to open next Saturday, and Anderson said the park will still open as planned, although the ride might not.

Anderson said a group of 16 employees were on the ride Saturday at roughly 5:30 p.m. for the coaster's 51st test run this season when something in the mechanism that holds the seat in the proper position disengaged. That triggered a safety precaution built into the ride: the car the employees were riding in stopped at the base of the vertical loop. The ride hits a peak of 115 feet - or 11 stories - at its highest point, according to the Carowinds web site.

When the car stopped, the employees were about 8 feet from the ground and climbed down a ladder to get off the ride, Anderson said.

Each of the park's rides are tested hundreds of times before the park opens each year, and the BORG Assimilator had already passed a South Carolina state inspection this year, Anderson said. This is the first time in four seasons that the park has had a problem with the coaster, he said. If an investigation can't show what went wrong, the ride won't open along with the rest of the park next weekend.

"We're not going to open it until it's safe, and we know what happened and whether it will happen again," he said.