World's tallest water slide set to open in Kansas

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- After three delays, the world's tallest water slide is scheduled to open this week.

Officials at Schlitterbahn water park in Kansas City, Kansas, said Tuesday that the public will be able to ride the Verrückt slide on Thursday.

Guinness World Records in April certified the 17-story, 168-foot-tall attraction as the tallest water slide in the world. Riders on the Verrückt, which means "insane" in German, plummet at 60 mph to 70 mph on four-person rafts.

Riders will have to walk up 264 steps to the top before they can take the heart-pounding plunge, CBS affiliate KCTV reports.

Watch raw video of a test run from KCTV:

The ride was originally scheduled to open on May 23, when the water park's season began. The next scheduled opening on June 5 was postponed, and a June 29 date also was delayed. Park officials have said the delays were needed to allow for more testing.

The water slide's co-creator Jeff Henry told KCTV that in early tests, rafts carrying sandbags flew off the slide, prompting engineers to reconfigure angles of the ride. Those fixes cost $1 million.

"We had many issues on the engineering side," Henry said. "Our correction coefficients were all off. Models didn't show air and water friction. A lot of our math was based on roller coasters at first, and that didn't translate to a water slide like this. No one had ever done anything like this before."