Thrill-a-Minute Can Mean Spill-a-Minute

When the terrifying Timber Wolf came to life in Kansas City, the man who built the beast was the first to ride it. Soaring over hills and roaring into turns, Charles Dinn kept thinking:

This is a really nice roller coaster.

But in 1990, on the opening day of its second season, a computer went haywire and one coaster train smacked into the back of the other. The ride ended with 48 people writhing in pain from broken bones, broken teeth, punctured tongues and twisted necks. A boy’s forehead was split from temple to temple.

“I looked down and there was blood covering my shirt, my jeans, just pouring off me,” said Jennifer Grizzell, who was 11 when the Wolf broke her leg, punched out a tooth and left a 3-inch gash bisecting a severed eyebrow.

“I looked back at my neighbor’s friend. She spit all her teeth into her hand.”

Dinn blamed the park, Worlds of Fun. The park blamed Dinn. The injured blamed everyone, including Curtis Summers, the man who designed the famous coasters that Dinn built by hand from solid lengths of Southern yellow pine. Years of lawsuits ensued.

The following year, theme park enthusiasts voted the Timber Wolf the most thrilling ride in America.

What is unusual about the Timber Wolf incident is that accidents like that are not all that unusual. The big thrill rides that are the heavily hyped centerpieces of a theme park sometimes are works in progress that are more perilous than park operators would have ticket-buyers believe.

Despite the amusement industry’s insistence that today’s technology has made thrill rides scarier but safer, an extensive study by the Associated Press has found an industry in which blunders are commonplace, government oversight lax or nonexistent, and injury-reporting incomplete and inaccurate.

In the race to have the fastest, biggest, wildest amusement rides in their market areas, amusement parks sometimes unveil a new ride on opening day that not only pushes the envelope for thrills, but tinkers with the margin of safety.

Amusement parks today expect minor injuries. Paying for a customer’s lost wages or doctor’s visit have become routine costs of doing business.

“It’s cheaper to pay some nominal settlement than re-engineer a ride,” said Howard Nations, a Houston lawyer who won a 1989 jury verdict of $2.5 million on behalf of a boy half-paralyzed by a roller coaster.

But when the number of soft-tissue injuries and slipped discs climbs too high, when broken bones supplant bumps and bruises, cumulative human injury becomes something akin to engineering data, and parks often retool a ride to bring the threshold of pain down to more fiscally tolerable levels.

In fact, fixing a ride’s flaws after it has opened for business has become standard practice. Patrons are guinea pigs.

“That’s kind of the norm,” said Dinn, an industry giant who concluded a bankruptcy case in May after three years of unprecedented finger-pointing inside the normally close-knit club of thrill-providers.

How much trial and error does the industry rely upon? “A lot,” he said.

What makes a new ride lucrative is the fact that it is faster, bigger, better--more thrilling than the rides that came before it. But to capture new sensations, the human body must be subjected to gravitational forces in a slightly different way.

So that means bugs sometimes must be worked out during actual commercial operation, conceded Robert Johnson, executive director of Outdoor Amusement Business Assn., a carnival trade group, and until 1994 the vice president for administration at Six Flags Entertainment Corp.

“It’s hard sometimes on paper to anticipate those forces,” he said. “People aren’t built the same. Some people can withstand forces differently than others.

“Any major new ride, it’s a trial ride. It’s a prototype. The first year is a trial year.”

Ride companies eventually make corrections if enough people get hurt because if they don’t, Johnson said, they could be liable for the sort of eye-popping punitive damages that show up under big newspaper headlines.

While the industry is waging an effort nationwide to convince states to pass so-called “rider responsibility” laws that punish patrons for misbehaving in parks, the people who make, market and inspect the world’s fun machines regularly accuse each other of doing a bad job.

Some examples:

* In a lawsuit against a designer, Six Flags said it spent $1.78 million revamping the curves and drops of three roller coasters in California, Texas and Georgia and compensating at least 70 people hurt while riding them, including one woman with a broken neck.

* The Fiesta Texas theme park toned down the Rattler roller coaster at least three times in the four years since it opened after scores of people got hurt, including three nuns and a curious chiropractor who decided to feel for himself the source of a patient’s pain.

* The Kentucky Kingdom theme park complained that a lap bar popped open after the debut of the Thunder Run coaster and that all the bars were subsequently found structurally unsound. A train also uncoupled climbing a hill.

* Houston’s AstroWorld added headrests to the Texas Cyclone after a lawsuit was filed by 16-year-old Cesar Gonzalez, whose neck was whipped so badly he ruptured a vein that sent a blood clot to his brain, leaving him half-paralyzed by a stroke.

* Fourteen-year-old Ryan Bielby flew out of the Timber Wolf last year and was killed in the fall. A lawsuit alleges her seat restraints came free; the park said that was impossible. The park was sold this year and the new owners replaced the seat restraints in time for the new season.

It’s impossible to tell how many people break their noses or knock out their teeth on rough rides every year. The industry is one of the least regulated and lightly monitored in the country. There are no federal guidelines for the gravitational forces that people pay to be buffeted by, and no coherent monitoring of injuries.

“The biggest problem is nobody keeps any records,” said former OSHA inspector Richard McClary, a private amusement-ride inspector and head of the Shelby County Safety Council in Nashville.

“It’s exactly the same spot as when OSHA came into industry. Nobody thought it necessary because nobody knew how serious the problems were.”

As proof of the safety of its rides, the amusement industry religiously cites the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s survey of emergency-room injuries, which typically estimate only about 7,000 to 8,000 ride injuries annually.

But the statistics don’t say how many people got hurt on which rides and at which parks and in which states, nor whether injury counts vary in places with good inspection programs and those with none.

The data also do not include people who seek treatment from their own doctors, a common occurrence.

In fact, the commission annually accepts the industry’s estimate of how many people visit amusement parks and divides it by the number of injuries estimated by its emergency-room sample--creating an infinitesimal ratio of park visits to injuries that the industry trots out whenever someone wants to toughen inspections.

Commission spokeswoman Kathleen Begala refused to allow the commission’s amusement-park expert, J. DeMarco, to be interviewed by a reporter. DeMarco had said that he would discuss the commission’s work if Begala would authorize it.

The industry does have a set of voluntary standards codified with the American Society of Testing Materials, which are updated by an unwieldy 183-member committee that meets only twice a year and is made up of manufacturers, operators, carnivals, theme parks and others with conflicting agendas.

“The standards in our country are probably the most lax standards compared to the British, French or German standards,” said Jeffery Abendshien, a private ride-safety engineer in Las Vegas.

Although thrill rides often are dependent on software these days, the American Society of Testing Materials hasn’t set standards for computer systems, nor limits on the gravitational forces to which parks can subject patrons. It had trouble deciding on the proper size of park fencing.

“We’re getting thrill rides that are more sophisticated. You have a lot more that can go wrong,” said private ride inspector Edward Pribonic, a former Disney engineer.

As location is to real estate, the word in the amusement business is capacity. Two trains on one track are better, and trickier, than one.

Nevada’s Clark County, the area around Las Vegas that has become a boomtown for casinos crashing the theme-park business, became one of the few governments anywhere to require independent software inspections after it discovered a potentially disastrous glitch while testing the 82-mph Desperado roller coaster at Buffalo Bill’s Casino in Stateline, Nev.

“One train had a hole in the software,” said county inspection chief David Durkee. “It didn’t know another train was on the track during its initial testing.”

Typically, a computer is supposed to keep one coaster train from plunging down that first big hill if the other coaster train, for some reason, has stalled on the tracks.

In the case of the Timber Wolf, Dinn said, lightning erased the program near the end of the debut season. He said he fixed the coaster so Worlds of Fun could at least run one train during the last lucrative weekend of a record-breaking year.

But Dinn said the park tried to fix the problem itself in the off-season and overrode the safety system. His account was disputed by Fred Bellemere, the lawyer for Worlds of Fun’s owners at the time, Hunt Midwest Enterprises Inc.

Bellemere said the park merely reloaded a computer program Dinn himself sent, presumably the same program that operated the dual coaster trains in the first place.

On opening day the next year, the coaster started out fine. In fact, Jenny Grizzell and her friends rode it 15 times.

On the 16th trip, though, she didn’t realize the train ahead had mysteriously stopped just as it neared the loading area. She didn’t realize that park workers were shouting for passengers in the stopped train to brace themselves.

She only knew that the train she was in was moving faster than before. She exchanged bug-eyed looks with her friend.

“I started to say something, then--Wham!--I was knocked out,” Grizzell said.

The industry insists that lawsuits and lost business provide powerful incentives to keep injuries down.

But the competition for customers also is a potent incentive to have a new ride ready for the short season, especially if the ride is the focus of a costly marketing campaign. Dinn’s contract with the Timber Wolf would have penalized him $2,500 for every day it was late.

“You’re talking basically Memorial to Labor Day, and there’s no question there is a lot of pressure to open that ride,” said Johnson, the former Six Flags executive.

Pribonic said he was hired as the outside inspector of an amusement park that once tried to talk him out of shutting down a spinning ride that was running fitfully on a perfect day of nice weather and big crowds.

Pribonic insisted, and found it riddled with dangerous internal cracks.

“It was a famous place,” he said. “Sometimes people try to squeeze one more season or week out of a piece of equipment that maybe they shouldn’t.”

Dinn blamed parks for pushing designers to come up with wilder rides capable of carrying more customers for briefer periods of time.

“So we get a few people with wrenched necks,” he said sarcastically. “We’re making a lot of money. We’ll fix it when we have time.”

Some rides never fix their flaws, he said. “Some of them will hurt you.”

Big thrill rides come from a small community of designers and builders who frequently make their coasters variations of others. New York’s famous Coney Island Cyclone, for example, was the inspiration for the Texas Cyclone at Six Flags AstroWorld, where Cesar Gonzalez suffered his paralyzing injuries.

“That was the extent of their research: Take the Coney Island Cyclone and make it Texas-sized,” said Houston lawyer Randy Allen, one of Gonzalez’s lawyers. “It was really kind of an experimental situation.”

Before the coaster debuted, Allen said, the park used watermelons and hams as stand-ins for children.

“If the ham or watermelon flew out, the kid presumably would too,” he said.

Six Flags hired Dinn and Summers to copy the AstroWorld ride at Six Flags Over Georgia and Six Flags Over Texas--but to improve and refine the forces passengers are subjected to in curves and banks, court documents say.

Johnson said such language was standard liability protection and not meant to imply the previous ride was unsafe.

Six Flags spokesman Steve Friedman said only that the company has “the highest standards in the industry and they’re always looking to improve to make sure all the rides are the safest they can be.”

The Georgia Cyclone opened in March 1990 and almost immediately began hurting people. Joni Crawford, 31, heard her neck crack and felt her right arm go numb on the first hill, a Six Flags document said. Her neck was broken.

Ultimately, the Cyclone was redesigned to “take out some of the hills and loops,” said Georgia state ride inspection chief Marcus Lovelady.

“I would say every coaster . . . has some little design engineering quirk that has to be adjusted minorly one way or way another,” he said.

Six Flags hired Dinn and Summers again in 1991 to make an even gentler version of Georgia’s Cyclone at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California, but the Psyclone, too, caused injuries that forced modifications.

Alleging defective design and citing mounting injuries, Six Flags sued and won a $1.78-million civil judgment against Summers’ design firm last year and a $125,000 settlement with Dinn’s bankrupt firm. Summers died of a heart attack in 1992 in the midst of the fight.

Johnson contended the actions against Dinn and Summers were legal tools used to spread liability costs among Six Flags’ business partners.

But the fact remains that companies which collectively tout the safety of their industry accuse each other of defective work when injuries and lawsuits result.

Kentucky Kingdom insisted that the Thunder Run’s coaster cars, obtained by Dinn from the almost legendary Philadelphia Toboggan Co., had badly welded lap bars and car hitches known to uncouple at other parks, according to court documents.

State inspectors made the park install safety belts.

Thomas Rebbie, who bought Philadelphia Toboggan from his boss in 1991 after working there 15 years, said he knew nothing about the Kentucky Kingdom complaints but acknowledged there were “some incidents” with that line of cars, which were discontinued.

He said his company has replaced Kentucky Kingdom’s cars.

Kentucky Kingdom this year also sold its Starchaser roller coaster, the target of five lawsuits, including one brought by 7-year-old Mary Noonan of Louisville, who suffered a collapsed lung and lacerated liver when the car she was in crashed into another in 1994.

Park marketing manger Debbie Vonderhite said the Starchaser was sold because “it did have extremely low capacity.”

The Darien Lake Theme Park in New York installed new brakes and a new computerized safety system and renamed it the Nightmare at Phantom Cave.

A fresh theme, a new look, a record-setting speed or height are fundamental components of a park’s marketing scheme. It is a carrot for consumers, and it is what prompts designers to push the envelope.

Claiming a superlative is so valuable that the Dorney Park theme park in Pennsylvania actually sued in 1990 when Six Flags Over Texas implied its Texas Giant was bigger than Dorney’s Hercules.

In 1992, the Rattler roller coaster at Fiesta Texas, a park outside San Antonio, laid claim to the title. It has triggered nearly 30 injury claims.

“They went all the way from, ‘Hey, my neck was sore for a week or two,’ to, “I had to have neck surgery,” says lawyer Carl Haggard, who had 25 clients.

He said the coaster was under “horrendous pressure” to open on time, yet: “It passed all sorts of inspections. I’m sure it met industry standards.”

But creative coasters mean cash. Worlds of Fun had record revenues the year the Timber Wolf opened and its only unprofitable season the year it crashed.

Dinn says he remembers riding with a Worlds of Fun executive on the Timber Wolf during its inaugural run.

“I remember thinking: This is a really nice roller coaster,” says Dinn. “He said, ‘You know, I’m disappointed. I thought it would be a lot more intense.”’