Bleat After Me: Rides Are Safe

In Animal Farm, George Orwell's classic tale of organizational control, barnyard beasts take over their farm under the leadership of a pig named Napoleon.  The sheep are taught to drown out public debate by bleating a patriotic slogan each time an animal questions the prevailing wisdom of the group's leader.  The repeated chant, "four legs good, two legs bad", keeps order in Orwell's fictional world.  

The amusement ride industry uses the chant "rides are safe" to the same purpose.  The party line is bleated -- oops, I mean repeated -- after every amusement ride accident or whenever an elected official threatens to repeal one of the theme park industry's regulatory loopholes.  A few choruses of "rides are safe", combined with a generous check to the majority party or an all-expense-paid Disney World congressional boondoggle, is usually enough to fend off any real accountability measures.  

Selling self-regulation to the public is a little more challenging.  Death,  dismemberment, brain damage, and broken necks are getting harder and harder to cover up.  In the wake of publicized accidents, the industry has been forced to up its rhetorical ante.  Qualifiers are creeping into the industry's chant:  

• Rides are safe ... if you're not too fat or too thin or too tall or too short or too young or too old or too stupid or too clever.
• Rides are safe ... if you're not one of those people whose brains hemorrhage or whose necks break under excessive force.
• Rides are safe for children ... if the child doesn't fall out the open side or slip underneath the lap bar or get caught in the machinery or make a mistake.
• Rides are safe ... if you weigh 175 pounds.

When the industry PR folks say "rides are safe", they mean "safe for most customers".  The rest of us are expendable.  We represent the cost of doing business.  Intamin, one of the industry's premier ride manufacturers, told the Los Angeles Times that their amusement rides are designed for 175-pound adults.  In the last three years, two overweight adults and one 12-year-old child have been ejected from Intamin rides when the restraint systems failed to hold them in place.  The manufacturer denies responsibility for all three accidents.  

As cold-hearted as Intamin sounds, the company is simply complying with the engineering standards created by the amusement ride industry.  ASTM F1159-97a sums up all the design and manufacture requirements for all amusement rides in three short pages.  Paragaph 5.1 says "the weight assigned to an adult passenger, for design purposes, shall be 170 lb".  Paragraph 5.2 says "the weight assigned to a 12-year-old child passenger, for design purposes, shall be 90 lb."  There is no requirement to design or test the ride for heavier or lighter passengers.  There is no requirement that restraint design take patron's size into account.  There is no requirement for manufacturers to define minimum or maximum patron weight in the documentation given to ride owners, or for ride owners to post that information for patrons. 

Intamin is in full compliance with federal laws governing amusement ride design, because there are no such laws.  State ride regulations have no authority over design and manufacture, only operations and maintenance.  Intamin is in full compliance with public disclosure laws governing theme park rides, because there aren't any public disclosure laws for ride manufacturers.  Some ride owners must report accidents in some states, but manufacturers are not accountable to any public agency.  

In short, Intamin can design and sell any ride that safely contains a 170-pound test dummy, no matter what the ride's safety record is under real-world conditions.  In fact, paying customers don't even have a right to know what the real-world safety record is.  Intamin rides may, in fact, be ejecting patrons in unregulated theme parks across the country, and the public just doesn't know.  

If I failed to seatbelt a child in my car, I'd be violating a law.  If I shook a child violently enough to snap his neck or cause a brain hemorrhage, I'd be arrested and jailed.  Those laws don't apply to commercially-operated thrill rides, though.  

If I rigged up some Rube Goldberg contraption in my backyard that wound up dropping a child from 140 feet or crushing a child in the machinery or tearing a child's limb in half, I'd be brought up on criminal charges.  Imagine if I tried to defend myself by pointing out that most of the kids survived.  "But, your honor, it was only the fat/thin/tall/short/weak/dumb/bad children who were hurt.  My machine is safe.  Don't you see?  It's the kids who are defective."  

It's time for consumers to tune out the industry sheep and begin to think for ourselves.  Amusement rides are designed for 170-pound adults.  The farther you are away from that design standard, the higher your risk for death or injury.  Instead of mindlessly bleating along with the industry sheep, pay attention to who is being hurt and how.  Use the information to choose rides that are safe for people your size and your child's size.  Amusement park patrons come in all sizes, shapes, and abilities -- 300 million different bodies every year, in fact.  We all deserve effective safety protection. 

• Rides are safe ... except when two separate restraint system fail and an overweight woman falls more than 100 feet to her death.  [California; September 2001; source:  Los Angeles Times ]
• Rides are safe ... except when the single restraint system fails and a 12-year-old child falls more than 100 feet to his death.   [California; August 1999; source:  San Jose Mercury Gazette ]  
• Rides are safe ... except when a 15-year-old girl's neck is broken by the normal forces of a ride dubbed "gentle" by the carnival owner.   [Alabama; October 2001; source:  Mobile Register ]
• Rides are safe ... except when two men's necks are broken in the span of three weeks by the normal forces of a theme park roller coaster.   [Ohio; July and August 2001; source:  Ohio Dept. of Agriculture]   
• Rides are safe ... except when a 7-year-old boy is fatally injured when a roller coaster without padding, seatbelts, or restraining bar stops short, throwing his body forward.   [Pennsylvania; September 2001; source:  York Daily Record ]
• Rides are safe ... except when an unrestrained 4-year-old girl is forcefully ejected from a carnival roller coaster as it rounds a corner.   [Connecticut; July 2001; source:  Connecticut Dept. of Public Safety]
• Rides are safe ... except when a 2-year-old boy suffers the traumatic amputation of his thumb after catching it between parts of a spinning floor mechanism on a carnival ride.   [Florida; January 2001; source:  Florida Dept. of Agriculture] 
• Rides are safe ... except when coaster cars collide, or giant wheels come off their spindles, or anti-rollback devices fail, or children are ejected because they're too small, or overweight adults are ejected because they're too big, or untethered inflatables catch a stiff wind, or swing rides collapse, or rafting rides overturn, etc., etc., etc.  [source:  http://www.rideaccidents.com]