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Last Sunday afternoon at a California carnival, Sophia Castillo entrusted the life of her little boy to an amusement ride and the people who make their living selling excitement to the masses. Six-year-old Reuben met the 42" minimum height limit for children riding alone, a measure set by the ride's manufacturer and, presumably, enforced by the ride's operator. Witnesses say the child appeared to panic when his car reached the summit. He fell to his death as his mother and the ride operator looked on.
The Giant Wheel was designed with open cars, no restraints at all, and a maximum loft of 90 feet. Despite the significant fall hazard, the manufacturer approved the ride for use by unaccompanied children as young as four years old. As a comparison, note that a U.S. employer can't legally send a trained adult worker 9 feet up in a cherry picker without a secure harness and tether.
Ride safety officials from the state of California inspect each carnival ride at least once a year to ensure that the manufacturer's minimum height limit is correctly posted. They do not have legal authority to question or override the manufacturer's recommendation, not even if they feel it might create an unsafe condition or know that it has created an unsafe condition in the past. The same is true of the twenty seven other U.S. states with government ride inspection programs. No public safety agency in this country requires manufacturers or operators to justify minimum height limits or provide age-appropriate restraints on amusement rides used by young children.
In order to meet industry standards and pass regulatory inspections, amusement rides must be structurally, electrically, and mechanically sound. In order to sell well to owner/operators, amusement rides must be attractive to the public and profitable to operate. Yet many amusement rides in operation today expose young children to fall hazards and crush hazards that can, and do, kill.
Amusement rides approved for use by young children are not necessarily safe for young children. This is a very difficult concept for non-industry folks to understand - not because we're stupid, but because we tend to trust the people who sell us stuff and we trust our government watchdog agencies to screen out significant product safety hazards.
The general public doesn't know that there aren't any child safety standards for full-sized amusement rides; that there are no standardized criteria for minimum height limits or containment systems; that no government approval process exists to audit child safety protections before or after a thrill ride is put into service.
The general public doesn't know that a manufacturer can follow any reasoning or criteria it likes when determining what type of child safety equipment, if any, to install, and that amusement rides can be popular and profitable while also exposing children to serious safety hazards. Low height limits broaden the market for a ride. Cars without restraints load more quickly, translating into higher sales volume, reduced requirements for operator/attendants, and fewer customer service complaints. Many more happy customers can outweigh the cost of a few more crushed children - not to the families of the crushed children of course, but to the folks who make their living off amusement rides. And those are the same folks whose consensus is required to draft and approve additional safety standards for amusement rides in this country.
Carnivals and amusement parks are high volume businesses. One child more or less isn't going to hurt the bottom line, especially when the manufacturer and owner/operator can truthfully say that the ride operated exactly as it was designed, and met all applicable laws and standards. The ride is safe, they'll say. But . where were the parents? That's the question asked first, last, and loudest each time a child is crushed by an amusement ride. The question is rhetorical. In most cases, news reports say exactly where the parent was. Sophia Castillo was watching from the ground as her little boy fell 90 feet to his death. "Why did the mother allow her child to ride alone?" That's a more interesting question to ask if you want to prevent more children from being crushed in the future. Nobody but Sophia Castillo can answer that fully and accurately, but here's one plausible scenario:
Unless you know the hazard patterns associated with young children and amusement rides, giant gondola wheels like the one that briefly carried Reuben Castillo last Sunday can appear quite tame compared to the rushing, whirling, zooming, screaming thrills that line carnival midways. Slow, sedate, and scenic might be your initial impression. Your boy wants to ride. You don't. Maybe you've got another child who can't or won't go on that ride. Maybe you're afraid of heights. Maybe you're feeling a little sick from the Crazy Mouse or the Tilt-a-Wheel or the chili dogs or the accumulated over-stimulation of a long, hot, noisy day.
But your little boy wants to ride and the sign says he's big enough, and it's his special day at the carnival. You assume that the people whose business it is to run these rides, the people you've been handing your money to all day, have taken your child's safety into account. If it wasn't safe, they wouldn't let kids ride. You don't see what's missing on the ride (i.e., restraints). Humans have very poor ability to spot things that aren't there. Our brains are wired to fill gaps in our interpretation of the present with pieces of memory (see Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, specifically "Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind's Eye"). As a mother on the midway at the end of a long day, your brain is filled with memories of moving vehicles equipped with restraints that keep children safely in place. The bulk of those memories come from non-amusement vehicles that, in this country, are required to have functional child restraints. Some of those memories come from amusement rides that happened to have functional child restraints or at least something that looks to a mommy like a functional child restraint. So you see a moving vehicle that kids are allowed to board alone, and your normally functioning human brain perceives an amusement ride that's safe for children.
The Giant Wheel doesn't necessarily look any more or less risky to a mommy on the midway than the ten or twenty other huge spinning machines she's entrusted her children to that day. Amusement rides all look dangerous to a mother, and that's exactly what makes them attractive to kids. The illusion of danger combined with the constant reassurance that rides are safe - those are the two key factors in drawing customers. Without the illusion of danger, kids wouldn't beg their parents for tickets. Without the reassurances of safety, parents wouldn't buy the tickets.
But on some rides used by children, it's the reassurances of safety that are illusory and the dangers that are very, very real. Those rides don't come with ANSI-standard warning labels so a parent can tell which machines are designed to protect children and which ones aren't. Like fall protection, ANSI-standard warning labels are only required to protect workers in this industry. Customers have to fend for themselves - even the kiddies.
Parents will intervene to protect their children when and if they understand the dangers and the potential consequences. Sophia Castillo failed to accurately analyze the containment system and the hazards present in the environment before she allowed her child to board an amusement ride. By the time she understood, it was too late to intervene. In hindsight it's easy to perform a rational analysis of an open container that rises 90 feet in the air, has no restraints, and allows 4-year-olds on board. It's easy in foresight for that small group of people who read amusement ride accident reports. The amusement ride industry knew about this hazard. So did the ride inspection community. So did I.
Hands-on supervision is the only way to ensure containment for young children on that ride. Eyes-on supervision won't help. Once that child boarded and the ride started to move, the operator was just as helpless as the boy's mother. If Sophia Castillo had known what the industry knows about giant gondola wheels and accident patterns involving young children on amusement rides, I'm betting she would have provided hands-on supervision or chosen a different ride for Reuben. The information isn't getting to the people held responsible for this type of risk assessment. That is the larger tragedy here. Because Reuben's death was preceded by a sad parade of crushed children and their stunned, grieving parents. That parade won't end with Reuben.
As long as the industry relies on the parent to perform an ad hoc containment analysis on every amusement ride before they let their child into the queue, children will continue to suffer and die. The state of New York is considering legislation that would make it illegal for owner/operators to allow unaccompanied young children on rides where the operator cannot continually watch riders. I'm intrigued by the concept, but Reuben's death reminds us that eyes-on supervision is not always sufficient. What you'd really need is a supervision analysis for each ride that carries young children. What would a parent have to do to get a child onto that ride? What would a child have to do to get into a seriously unsafe position? How likely is it that a child of the minimum height might do it, out of fear or excitement or ignorance or confusion or boredom? What proximity, speed, strength, and knowledge would be needed for an adult to intervene effectively? In Reuben's case:
- It's reasonably foreseeable that a parent might put a child who's over 42 inches tall on a ride with a 42-inch minimum height limit.
- It's reasonably foreseeable that an unrestrained kindergartener might stand up, be knocked off balance as the car stops or starts, and fall out.
- It's reasonably foreseeable that a fall of 90 feet could kill a small child.
- Hands-on supervision is required to ensure the child's safety.
That's a little more complicated than asking the rhetorical question: "where were the parents", but I believe it might prove far more effective at stopping the sad parade of children crushed by amusement rides.
On July 17, Saferparks posted an online report analyzing available regulatory data on accidents involving falls and ejections from amusement rides. Two thirds of these accidents involve children under 10.
