Knott’s to Revamp Ride That Hurt 5

Fearing a repeat of Monday’s accident that injured five parkgoers, Knott’s Berry Farm officials Tuesday pledged to overhaul the park’s longest and most heavily promoted ride, the wooden GhostRider roller coaster.

Employees on daily inspections could see no sign that a piece of wood along the track was working loose under the coaster’s pounding, Knott’s General Manager Jack Falfas said. A 3-foot shard snapped up and struck the riders.

Falfas said he would order all suspect pieces of wood clamped together with metal brackets or find another way to ensure no more such accidents.

“I’m not just going to fix it right at that spot,” he said. “I’m going to fix it everywhere. . . . I’m waiting to come up with the ultimate solution.”

With state regulation of amusement park rides looming, Knott’s and Paramount’s Great America theme park in Santa Clara, where another accident on a free-fall ride killed a parkgoer Sunday, moved quickly to investigate the accidents.

Even as they did, news of yet another fatality--this one late Monday on a standing roller-coaster ride at Paramount’s King’s Dominion amusement park in Virginia--added urgency to calls for greater oversight of the industry.

On Tuesday, nearly a dozen ride experts converged on Knott’s in Buena Park to find out why the board, a trim piece that bore no weight, broke loose beneath GhostRider.

The ride, billed as the longest wooden roller coaster west of the Mississippi, will remain closed until manufacturer Custom Coaster Inc. decides it can be reopened, said Richard Brown, a biodynamics specialist retained by Knott’s.

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Paramount’s Great America in Santa Clara quickly hired a consulting firm, Exponent Inc. in Menlo Park, to help determine how Joshua Smurphat of Sunnyvale, a mentally disabled 12-year-old, plummeted to his death Sunday from the 224-foot Drop Zone Stunt Tower as his mother looked on.

Police are focusing on whether the worker assigned to check Joshua’s harness was adequately trained and whether the worker checked the harness.

The boyfriend of the boy’s mother, who rode along with Joshua, told police that no one checked the harnesses and that Joshua’s came open when the ride, after a 100-foot free-fall, was suddenly slowed by a magnetic braking system.

Santa Clara Police Sgt. Anton Morec said the worker assigned to check the harness was a seasonal employee under 18 years old, but the officer refused to divulge the name.

Park spokesman Timothy Chenaud denied the harness had come open, saying it was closed when the chair reached the ground.

At Paramount’s amusement park in Virginia, just north of Richmond, officials blamed “rider misconduct” for the Monday night death of Timothy Fan, 20, of Long Island, N.Y. Fan died while riding the Shockwave, a 50-mph stand-up roller coaster that turns riders upside down several times.

Paramount officials immediately shut down both the Drop Zone and the Shockwave rides. Pending resolution of investigations, they also closed similar rides at Paramount’s two other U.S. parks and at one near Toronto.

But Paramount Parks spokeswoman Susan Lomax said witnesses told investigators that Fan was acting inappropriately on Shockwave and caused his own death. She said she had no details.

The highly competitive amusement park industry, which has been using computers to design ever-scarier thrill rides, is not regulated nationally, and state laws vary considerably.

A bill to require statewide inspections in California, one of a dozen states with no regulation of permanent amusement park rides, won approval Monday before a key state Senate committee and is pending before the full Senate. The Assembly already passed the measure but must approve Senate changes before the bill goes to Gov. Gray Davis.

Many industry officials contend they do a better job of policing safety than state inspectors would do, and indeed major accidents are rare. But in the wake of a fatal Christmas Eve accident at Disneyland, which state officials blamed on inadequate training, the cries for regulation have intensified.

“For something that doesn’t happen that frequently, it’s been happening with real frequency,” said Kathy Dresslar, a Sacramento lobbyist for the nonprofit Children’s Advocacy Institute in San Diego.

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Another supporter of regulation is Consumers Union. Elisa Odabashian, a senior policy analyst for the organization, said most of the low-income people for whom her group works would probably be surprised to learn that there are no state standards for or inspections of amusement parks.

She said she was especially disturbed to learn that workers checking harnesses at the Drop Zone ride were teenagers so young their names cannot be released.

“Why is a non-adult responsible for making sure these people are safe at 200 feet in the air?” Odabashian said. “Two hundred feet up is plenty high, and I’d want to be sure a trained adult is checking my safety. I want to be sure I’m buckled in right, and I don’t think I want to leave that to the discretion of an underaged worker.”

Falfas, Knott’s general manager, said the park’s safety measures include daily inspections of the stack of boards over which Ghost-Rider travels, a structure designed to flex under stress.

Over time, Falfas said, the flexing wiggled loose a three-inch nail in the place where the accident occurred. Eventually, the wood poked up enough to catch on the bottom of the roller-coaster train, causing it to flip toward the passengers, he said.

The ride is inspected each morning, but nothing would have appeared abnormal from the outside, he said, and the roller coaster operated safely for an hour before the accident.

It remains unclear how long the GhostRider will stay closed.

“If I had my choice, I’d like to have it open by the weekend,” Falfas said. “But that would be wishful thinking. It’s one of our big items. I’m just not going to do it until it’s right and I feel comfortable with it.”