‘The Cyclone’ Hits the Carnivals

The Cyclone hit the 1991 Arizona State Fair like a desert storm, injuring 14 people who thought they were having fun. It came back the next year and hurt seven more.

It rumbled over the border into Orange County and catapulted some Californians into the air, tallying eight injuries in 1993 and one more the following year.

It moved on to the California town of Lancaster two months later, injuring five people on a single Sunday in September. The next day, it sent four girls to a first-aid station with sore ribs and aching stomachs.

At least 38 people were bumped, cut, bruised, twisted or tossed skyward in five days over four years in two states--all of them banged up by one itinerant roller coaster with chronically colliding cars.

“We had a couple of accidents,” said Stephen “Buddy” Merten, head of B&B; Amusements out of Yuma, Ariz. “A couple were mechanical and a couple were employee error. Roller coasters sometimes can be accident-prone.”

It took a few years, but the cumulative weight of the Cyclone’s safety record was one reason why the Orange County Fair selected a new ride supplier last year after using B&B; for a decade, said fair general manager Becky Bailey-Findley.

If it were up to some states, there would be a system for keeping track of the carnivals that traipse across the country. As it stands now, state laws are a mad tangle of conflicting and self-contained rules and regulations, some enforced, some not, with no clear way to distinguish between the good, the bad and the deadly. Fourteen states have no inspection programs at all. Injury reporting in general is spotty and inaccurate.

“Federal legislation is what’s needed,” said Florida state ride inspection chief Ron Safford. “They [carnivals] are involved in interstate commerce. I think there ought to be some type of federal standard.”

Ride inspectors from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and New York recently formed a loose alliance to trade information and build track records about certain types of rides and traveling shows that operate at the least-careful end of the outdoor entertainment spectrum.

Even though each of those states regulates rides differently, they are seeking common ground largely out of necessity. The rules differ dramatically from place to place--sometimes even within a particular community.

Nevada’s Clark County, the area around Las Vegas, is bursting with new theme parks. The local government has drawn up some of the strictest amusement park standards in the country--but only for high-tech rides, like the ballyhooed Big Apple roller coaster that wraps itself like an anaconda around a casino replicating the New York City skyline.

Anyone who wants to put in a mega-ride must have detailed software, structural, mechanical and electrical inspections from a short list of experts. The county even threw back a big Japanese coaster builder’s initial plan for the Big Apple because it lacked a required structural-fatigue analysis.

“In one case they had a calculation for a beam at one location and there wasn’t a beam at that location,” chief building inspector David Durkee said.

But when it comes to the dusty carnivals that drift into the county, even the rides that play the Clark County Fair don’t get inspected because neither county nor state law requires it.

Durkee said he’s “almost glad we don’t do carnivals, which travel on shoestring budgets. They don’t hire a guy who knows how to weld. They hire a guy who’s learning how to weld.”

Florida embraces an almost opposite philosophy. State inspectors don’t inspect the high-tech rides at Busch Gardens, Universal Studios and Disney World because those politically influential entities were granted exceptions under state laws.

But inspectors do race across the state to inspect every traveling show every time it opens. That means if a small carney hopscotches shopping malls every week, an inspector is there, looking for worn pins, structural cracks, bad brakes.

“I prefer to be inspected every week,” said Richard McDaniel, who runs a small carnival that plays parking lots and backwater outposts from New Jersey to Florida. “Even I’ve overlooked some things that may have cost a life. With some of the guys I pick up on the street, you need an inspector.”

In Florida, he’s likely to encounter Hunter “Captain Crack” Lyles, an inspector who earned his sobriquet because of his obsessive knack for finding structural cracks.

“Guy sets it up 14 times a year. I inspect it every time,” he said, looking up at a portable thrill ride called the Gravitron.

But an audit of the department contends that overworked inspectors spend too much time trying to inspect everybody, and should focus their energies on the worst carnivals, which is the way the program is run in Ohio and Georgia.

Though state inspectors say ride quality is better than it was years ago, there is ample evidence that some parks are far less scrupulous about safety than others.

For example: An AP computer analysis of more than 30,000 records in Florida, which draws traveling carnivals from across the eastern United States, showed that some amusement businesses had five, six, seven times as many safety violations per ride as others.

In fact, three quarters of the rides inspected in Florida from January 1994 to May 1996 had something wrong with them. The most common faults were worn-out structural pins, the small but crucial part that holds most rides together.

In states with no inspection programs, Safford said, the risk of ride failure must be far greater. “I think they’re taking a big chance,” Safford said.

Many safety inspectors nationwide say that the most difficult to maintain rides gravitate naturally toward the states with the least inspections, and ultimately are dumped on developing nations.

“When equipment reaches a point where it becomes a maintenance nightmare, most of it winds up in Mexico,” said John Fussner, an amusement park safety consultant in Cincinnati. “I go to Mexico. I see it.”

“We don’t have any standards at all in Mexico,” said Analisa Benavent, general manager of the Mexican Assn. of Amusement Parks.

What little injury data there are is misleading. Most governments find out about injuries from the parks themselves, news stories or lawyers hunting for ammo before filing a lawsuit.

“Injuries are dramatically underreported,” Safford said.

At the 1994 Florida state fair, for example, only one injury was recorded. Safford said when state inspectors were posted there the following year, 54 injuries were recorded--a fact he attributed solely to bullish monitoring.

Even though Nevada’s Clark County has what is considered one of the toughest inspection programs in the country, county officials this year watered down their rules for monitoring injuries. Before, parks had to report any injury that required a visit to a doctor; now, an injury is defined as an overnight stay in a hospital.

Also, the parks themselves and not the county are responsible for keeping track of accidents and injuries. The county agreed not to keep its own records beyond one year, meaning that specific rides will no longer build up injury track records.

“There was a push among the big players,” Durkee said of the reason for the changes. “It just became lawyer food.”

As for the Cyclone, the coaster was too big, unwieldy and expensive to keep carting around the country, Merten said. He said he spent $30,000 on a computerized braking system aimed at eliminating mistakes, then finally got rid of it.

“We sold it to an amusement park in Mexico,” he said.