Saferparks Letter to the House Commerce Committee

U.S. House of Representatives, Commerce Committee
2125 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Re:  HR 2207 - National Amusement Park Ride Safety Act.

Thank you for meeting with me earlier this month.  The five-year lock on Congressman Markey's consumer safety bill frustrates me enormously.  Lack of public access to thrill ride accident records hampers my company's ability to keep the public informed about emerging hazards in this rapidly-evolving industry.  Consumers can't protect themselves and their children from hazards that are kept hidden.  You can't keep people ignorant and safe at the same time, especially not in an industry that loads 300 million children and adults onto complex high-speed machinery every year.

Since we met, another fatal ejection has taken place at a U.S. amusement park.  On Saturday, May 23, a 7-year-old girl was thrown from a Scrambler ride in Rye, New York.  She suffered massive head injuries and was killed.  Small children are at highest risk of ejection from amusement rides with industry standard lap bars; those devices are not designed to keep children securely in place.  The Consumer Product Safety Commission is currently conducting an in-depth study to determine whether industry standards for ride restraint systems are adequate.  Due to the 1981 exemption, none of this year's amusement park fatalities can be included in that investigation.  From a scientific standpoint, excluding those events is nonsensical.  From a human suffering standpoint, it is a shameful waste. 

Saturday's tragic accident was only the latest link in a long chain of amusement ride containment failures involving young children and industry-standard lap bars.  That type of restraint system was developed early in the last century to protect adult riders.  Lap bar restraints have proven, over and over again, year after year, to fail for small children.  The industry continues to use them because they're profitable.  An unregulated free market rewards those who are willing to exploit every advantage, often at the expense of the most vulnerable.  That is exactly what we're seeing here. 

The child safety hazard posed by industry-standard lap bars on amusement rides is comparable to the exploding gas tank hazard posed by Ford Pinto automobiles a few decades ago.  As you'll recall, Ford deliberately chose a cheaper gas tank design resulting in a higher rate of customer death and injury because the cost-benefit analysis showed that to be the most profitable strategy.  The amusement ride industry knows that lap bars expose the smallest riders to more risk than adult riders, but those devices also reduce load/unload time.  The increase in hourly rider capacity far outweighs the cost of higher insurance premiums and civil settlements.  That is why the industry standards committee does not address this problem.  There are no child safety standards for rides like the Scrambler.  The industry would incur cost if it had to account for issues related to normal child development.  The death and maiming of a handful of kids doesn't amount to much when averaged out across 300 million paying customers a year.  The full cost impact, financial and emotional, is borne only by the families of the unlucky children who discover this hazard the hard way.

I've included a few examples to illustrate the trend, which extends across both sides of the industry (fixed-site and portable).  All of the children injured in these accidents met the manufacturer's recommended height limit for the ride:

• June 2002 - A 4-year-old girl was ejected from a spinning ride (Wipeout) while sitting next to her mother.  She was hospitalized in critical condition with a head injury and broken bones.  State inspectors found that the fixed lap restraint did not fit securely against her body, allowing the forces of the ride to propel her out of her seat.  [Vallejo, California - amusement park]
• September 2001 - A 6-year-old boy was ejected from a spinning ride (Wipeout) while riding alone in a seat wide enough for three riders.  State inspectors found that the fixed lap restraint did not fit securely against his body, allowing his legs to come up under the bar.  [Lancaster, California - carnival]
• August 2001 - An 8-year-old girl was ejected from a spinning ride (Twister).  The police report stated that the ride operator attributed the ejection to the child's size.  Although she exceeded the minimum height limit by five inches, she was thin (68 pounds).  [Indianapolis, Indiana - carnival].
• September 2000 - 4-year-old boy fell out the open side of a moving dark ride onto the floor where he was struck and pinned by following car, and was dragged for an indeterminate length of time before the vehicles came to a stop.  He suffered serious internal injuries not limited to the following: fractured pelvis, fractured coccyx, ruptured diaphragm, lacerated spleen, global brain damage.  The industry-standard lap bar was designed to fit closely against the largest passenger (his mother), leaving smaller passengers unprotected.  [Anaheim, California - amusement park]
• July 2000 - A 6-year-old boy was thrown from a spinning ride (Scrambler) and hospitalized with leg injuries that required 200 stitches.  [New Jersey - carnival]
• August 1998 - (1) An 8-year-old boy was ejected from a spinning ride [Sidewinder] when centrifugal force caused him to let go of the lap bar. He came out through the opening at the lower side of the gondola.  (2) A 5-year-old boy was ejected from the same ride six days later, also coming out from underneath the lap bar.  Both children met the minimum height limit.  [Darrien Lake, New York - amusement park]
• February 1997 - A 3-year-old child managed to exit a spinning ride (Family Sizzler) and was dragged under the ride for 3/4 of a revolution before the ride could be stopped. The rigid lap bar engaged the larger rider seated next to the victim, but left sufficient room for smaller victim to slip out of the vehicle and be run over by the trailing vehicle.  The girl died of massive head injuries.  [Clark County, Nevada - amusement park]

The Ford Motor Company was able to profit from the Pinto only as long as the public remained unaware of the gas tank hazard.  In other words, suppression of information on known hazards allowed Ford to dupe its customers, and created a disincentive for the company to design safer products.  If that could happen in a regulated industry, imagine what can happen when a $10 billion industry is allowed to operate without any federal safety standards, public reporting requirements, or product safety oversight.

In the absence of a federal regulatory presence, chronic industry-wide safety issues such as containment failures related to fixed lap bars go unaddressed.  Some states have good ride safety programs in place, but even the best state programs are limited in jurisdiction.  Each accident spawns, at most, a local fix and there's wide variation in how a particular problem will be solved.  Each time a systemic problem is fixed locally, new variants of ride machinery and operational policies are created.  The combinations and permutations are limitless, and there isn't any centralized source of accurate technical information describing which types of equipment pose risks to which groups of people.  One variant of a ride may be appropriate for young children to ride in, while another variant of the same ride is not.  The variations may be readily apparent to industry experts, but they aren't readily apparent to the average family looking for an afternoon's entertainment. 

Consumers cannot make responsible choices under such disorganized conditions.  Children will continue to fly out of rides they shouldn't be on; the industry will continue to blame those accidents on the children and their parents.  The House Commerce Committee perpetuates this cycle of needless suffering and waste by allowing the powerful theme park industry to profit from the suppression of safety-critical information. 

Those are my frustrations with the current system - or, more precisely, the current lack of system.  Our conversation didn't do much to eliminate my frustration, but I am grateful for your willingness to talk through the issues and explain the majority's position. 

At our meeting, we talked about creating a national ride registry and accident reporting system.  That is Saferparks' primary goal at this point.  If Congressman Stearns continues to stall consumer protection efforts in the House of Representatives, I will work on getting the Senate to move forward.  If need be, I will bring some of those damaged children and their grieving parents to Capitol Hill with me.  Those parents have nothing left to lose.  At the very least, the publicity may help to warn other parents of the risk they take when they trust their children's lives to unregulated heavy machinery.

Requiring that operators of commercial thrill rides register information about their machinery and publicly report detailed information about accidents is a reasonable request.  If done thoroughly and well, it would provide great benefit to consumers and safety officials.  Public accident reporting and trend analysis is commonplace in all other machinery-based industries except this one.  Even if the Commerce Committee does not believe in imposing mandatory safety standards on this industry or requiring that serious accidents be investigated by public safety officials, making safety records available to consumers is an integral principle of the free market.

I've attached an article on the lack of federal safety oversight that ran Sunday in the Los Angeles Times .  Clark Robinson, executive director of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) was quoted as saying:  "It makes no sense to dedicate over-stretched federal dollars to what is already a thorough and capable oversight process."  That's the same Clark Robinson and the same IAAPA that wrangled 50 million "over-stretched federal dollars" from the House Commerce Committee last year for a marketing campaign aimed at drawing more customers to Florida's theme parks.  Following the hearing, Mr. Robinson told Amusement Business magazine that "he felt it was vital for the federal government to get involved in the international travel and tourism industry".

I also feel it is vital for the federal government to get involved in this industry.  A national ride registry and accident reporting system is long overdue, and it would cost taxpayers a whole lot less than subsidizing the theme park industry's marketing campaign.  Please contact me if you have any questions. 

Kathy Fackler
Saferparks