Rides of Your Life:
When the Thrill
is Gone

Roller coasters and other amusement park "thrill" rides are in an all-out race for bragging rights as the world's fastest, highest and scariest.  With alarming and increasing frequency they are giving thrill seekers considerably more than they bargain for:  whiplash, brain hemorrhages, broken limbs and ribs, paralysis, even death.

A decade ago, roller coasters averaged 55 miles per hour.  Today they average more than 70 and some approach 100 mph.  They climb higher, drop more suddenly, whip and swirl more swiftly.  And they inflict G forces higher than those endured by astronauts at lift-off.

The “Rattler’s” story illustrates the risks amusement park patrons take.  In 1990, Fiesta Texas, a San Antonio park, contracted to build the world’s highest, steepest, fastest and longest continuous wooden-span roller coaster. When the $5.7 million Rattler opened to

the public a year and a half later, it did set records, but only because its design had been changed during construction to make sure it did.  Combined with bad weather, those modifications caused the ride to open without adequate field testing, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

The Rattler’s first drop was 166 feet and inflicted 5 G-forces on its riders.  That’s about 80 pounds of pressure.  The original design had called for a maximum of 3 G’s.  During the drop, another 1.5 G-forces (about 24 pounds of pressure) struck suddenly from the left, then the right, as the ride whipped side to side.  Not surprisingly, injury reports started almost immediately. 

“It feels like someone tried to take your head off,” one rider said. 

“I must tell you that (the Rattler) was the most painful ride I'd ever been on!” another wrote.  “I mean, it actually hurt to ride it.”

Types of Injury

Amusement park rides cause injuries far more serious than bloody noses, including broken limbs and ribs, brain hemorrhages and blood clots, and “diffuse axonal injuries” – the scientific term for what happens when the head is jerked violently in the wrong direction, such as in whiplash and shaken baby syndrome.  A recent report by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes documented 15 cases of ride-related brain injury since 1979.  Only one occurred before 1990, and 13 happened since 1994 – telling evidence that rides are getting more dangerous.

A sampler of cases from the past few years illustrates the seriousness and variety of ride-related accidents and injuries.

2001

•	A 28-year-old woman was slumped over dead when her train arrived at the end of its run on Goliath, a 255-foot high, 85 mile-per-hour “hypercoaster” at Six Flags Magic Mountain, California.  She apparently had suffered an aneurysm or bleeding at the brain stem.  Goliath had been known to cause minor black-outs on one of its more intense spirals.
•	A 20-year-old woman suffered fatal head and neck injuries when her train slammed into the back of another on the Treetop Twister at Lightwater Valley, North Yorkshire, UK.  Several others were injured.
•	Twenty-two persons were hurt, a few of them knocked unconscious, at Six Flags New England when brakes failed on the Superman Ride of Steel roller coaster and one train crashed into another at the loading platform.

2000

•	Brake failure also caused a train to plow into another at the loading station of the Pepsi Max Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, England, injuring 14.  The injuries included broken ribs and limbs.
•	A 6-year-old boy was drowned when he fell off his inner tube on a Lake Compounce water slide, also in England.

1999

•	A woman riding Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Studios in California suffered chest injuries when she was thrown against her lap bar at the end of an 81-foot drop into water.

	In August 1999, four persons were killed in amusement parks:
•	A 12-year-old boy fell out of a free-fall ride, Drop Zone at Paramount's Great America theme park in Santa Clara, California.
•	A 20-year-old college student fell to his death from the Shockwave roller coaster, a ride that “drops” its standing riders along a 90-foot vertical loop and sideways spiral, at Paramount's Kings Dominion theme park in Doswell, Virginia.
•	A 39-year-old woman and her 8-year-old daughter were killed on the Wild Wonder roller coaster at Gillian’s Wonderland Pier in Ocean City, New Jersey, when their car rolled backward down a 30-foot incline and crashed into another.

1998

•	A 15-year-old girl was killed and her brother and a friend were injured when their lap bar broke away and they were jettisoned from the high-speed “Himalaya” roller coaster in Austin, Texas.  The centrifugal force threw her against a nearby wall.  The ride had passed an inspection only 10 days earlier by the industry's “Safety Man of the Century,” Bob Gill, even though he had found four safety bars with broken latches.  An hour before the girl was killed, three other riders had reported broken safety bars on the ride, and still more bars broke in subsequent testing.
•	A 46-year-old Texas woman suffered an aneurysm and severe brain hemorrhaging on a computer-driven high-speed jeep ride, “Indiana Jones Adventure,” at Disneyland.
•	A 5-year-old tried to break free from his mother and leave his seat a few seconds too soon on Disneyland’s “Big Thunder” roller coaster.  His foot was crushed between the car and loading platform and torn in half.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) counted 43 riders and 58 park employees killed in ride-related accidents from 1987 through 1997, a combined average of 9.1 a year.  The CPSC also estimated that 9,200 persons were treated in hospital emergency rooms for ride-related injuries in 1998, up 87 percent from 1994. About half of the injuries (and most of the increase) occurred at fixed amusement parks, with another 2,100 injuries at traveling carnivals and the remaining 2,600 of unknown origin.

But even those numbers may underestimate the problem.  CPSC uses the National Electronic Injury Surveillance (NEIS) system, which monitors 101 geographically distributed American hospitals.  Amusement parks aren’t as evenly distributed as hospitals: Only two NEIS hospitals take patients from any of the top 40 parks, which account for almost a third of the 500 million park attendees each year, and one of those two hospitals accepts only children.

Who’s Minding the Store?

CPSC regulates elevators, ski-lifts and children’s toys.  It even regulates traveling carnival rides.  It does not have authority, however, over fixed-location amusement parks, including the nation’s super-sized theme parks that vie to have the fastest, scariest rides, those that draw by far the lion’s share of thrill-seekers.  The Commission did regulate fixed-location rides from 1968 to 1981, but had to cease when industry lobbyists finally succeeded in winning from a deregulation-minded Congress exemption for all rides “permanently fixed to a site.”   CPSC was forbidden to investigate accidents, develop or enforce safety plans, collect accident data from owners, operators and builders of the rides, or share such information with others to help prevent repeat accidents.

The only safeguards left in place are an ineffective hodge-podge of state requirements, insurance rules, and self-regulation.  Thirteen states have no amusement park inspection program at all:  Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Vermont.  Florida, the home of Disney World, exempts all three of its largest parks.

New York State exempts Coney Island.

In states that do inspect amusement park rides, effectiveness depends on which agency is assigned the task, its resources and its area of expertise.  Often the expertise does not extend to safety design and engineering, and the resources are meager.  Even when state inspection and regulation do work, they cannot stop hazardous rides from simply moving across the border.

A Case Study:  The Himalaya roller coaster that hurled high school sophomore Leslie Lane to her death in Texas in March 1998 had already severely injured two teenage girls in an almost identical accident eight years before – in El Centro, California.  Like Leslie, when their lap bar failed, the two were flung from the car by centrifugal force.  One dislocated her knee, shoulder and jaw, and sprained a wrist and elbow; a blood clot on her brain caused night blindness for years.  Her friend’s arm was paralyzed and she couldn’t work.  She slid into depression and alcoholism and died of liver failure at 30. 

Two days after the California accident, the ride cleared a safety inspection and reopened.  It traveled from fairground to fairground throughout California, accumulating citations for safety violations, many involving the safety bars.  By 1998, California officials had had enough of that and went to shut down the Himalaya for good, but the ride had already made its getaway.  A month later, it turned up in Austin, Texas, where California regulators had no standing.  Ten days later, Leslie Lane lay dead at the foot of a wall.

Blaming Riders

Industry spokespersons almost invariably attribute as much as 80 percent of accidents and injuries to rider misbehavior – “horseplay, alcohol, or stupidity,” in the words of a litigation advisor to 250 amusement parks.

•	U.S. News quoted a Beverly Hills attorney:  “When you get on a ride, you don’t assume you may be thrown out or end up in a coma.”
•	The Washington Post quoted a safety consultant:  “The public is expecting more and more and more, and the park operators are giving them more and more and more.  That’s okay to do that.  But when you reach the point that personal safety relies on participation from the rider, then you’ve probably gone too far.  We may have reached that point.”

Keeping Painful Secrets

Secrecy compounds the problem.  In most states, what safety enforcement exists relies heavily on the willingness of parks to report when riders are injured.  Failure to make such reports is commonplace.

In Texas, injuries that require treatment must be reported to the Department of Insurance.  In 1992 and 1993, Fiesta Texas, home of the “Rattler,” reported 13 incidents of treatment for neck and back injuries.  Not reported were 110 similar or worse injuries to riders, all of them taken to hospitals.  Conveniently excluded from reports were all victims who had been knocked unconscious and couldn’t remember what had happened to them.  Some of the unreported cases:

•	A 12-year-old girl who fainted during the Rattler’s 166-foot plunge.  The ride “whipped around (her) unconscious form like a rag doll,” the San Antonio Express-News reported.  She suffered a bruised spinal cord.  Part of her hipbone was used to fuse three vertebrae and she had to wear a “halo” neck brace for six months.  She said the ride “ruined my life for six years.”
•	A woman with a possible broken collarbone, who said she couldn’t remember what had happened.
•	A teen-ager who “freaked out.”  A paramedic wrote that “he is scared and doesn’t understand why.”
•	A 57-year-old who, a paramedic wrote, said that “she can’t walk and it hurts to stand.”

For this reason, park operators are lobbying states to impose rules of conduct on riders.  This helps shift legal blame to the riders when injury suits go to court.  Disclaimers on tickets and signs that warn riders that they “ride at your own risk” further build on the notion that amusement parks are not responsible for accidents that occur.  But legal experts point out that, regardless of how fast a ride goes or how steep or long the drop, riders should have a reasonable expectation that it will be designed and operated safely and not pose a threat of real danger.

In all, during its first two years, Fiesta Texas treated 227 people for ride-related injuries, almost all of them for neck and back pain.  Such information only became known, however, when hundreds of ambulance reports were disclosed during litigation.

In California, while Disneyland’s Columbia sailing ship was docking on Christmas Eve 1998, an eight-pound cleat (the metal device for attaching mooring ropes) broke loose and fatally struck a Washington State man in the head. Disneyland summoned an emergency medical team but did not notify police. When police did arrive 40 minutes later, having received a courtesy call from paramedics, the scene had been sanitized of evidence, including blood and debris, by the image-conscious park operators.  Both police and the California Occupational Safety & Health Administration would like to inspect accident scenes left undisturbed, but their hands are tied:  no law requires it.

As a consequence, it typically takes court action to force theme parks to reveal the truth about ride-related injuries.  In June 2001, a court order forced The Walt Disney Corporation to hand over all accident reports from both its California and Florida parks. Among other things, those reports revealed that “Indiana Jones,” Disneyland’s computer-controlled jeep ride, had inflicted hundreds of serious injuries, including brain stem bleeding.

Solution: Re-Regulation

Most outside observers agree that effective oversight of park rides will not be in place until a national system of regulation is restored.  The most logical agency to be assigned the task is the one that had it before – CPSC.  Legislation pending in Congress, authored by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), would accomplish that by eliminating the so-called “roller coaster loophole.”  It would again give CPSC authority to:

•	Investigate accidents at fixed-site amusement parks.
•	Develop and enforce action plans to correct defects that are found.
•	Require that substantial hazards be reported to CPSC.
•	Serve as a national clearinghouse for accident and defect information so that what is learned about an accident in one state can help improve safety in others.

“Right now it is illegal for anybody with 50-state responsibility to step inside a park if there has been an accident or death,” says Rep. Markey’s spokesperson, David Moultin.  “We say that’s crazy.  Even if a park is doing an excellent job in safety, there are going to be accidents, (and) you’re going to learn something from those accidents.  And what you learn should be shared among all those states.  (But) the industry says no, no, no, no.”

(08/29/01)