Park Ride Restraints Debated

This weekend’s Disneyland accident has focused attention on the use of lap bars at amusement parks--a technology that has existed since New Jersey’s Drop the Dip opened in 1907 but has been blamed for several theme park accidents in recent years.

Late Friday night, a 4-year-old boy fell from Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, a popular Disney ride that offers passengers a spinning whirlwind of strobe lights, mirrors and music. The ride is designed to evoke the world of Toontown, from the 1988 movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

The boy, a Southern California resident whom authorities have not identified, fell from the first of two connected cars. He was caught under the second car, suffered severe trauma and did not have a pulse when paramedics arrived at 10:23 p.m. He was revived and was listed in critical condition Sunday at UCI Medical Center.

The ride will remain closed today, as the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health continues its investigation by interviewing Disneyland employees and, possibly, the boy’s parents. Cal/OSHA is charged, under a state law that took effect this year, with investigating deaths and serious accidents at amusement parks.

Disney officials did not elaborate Sunday on the accident, and declined to discuss lap bars.

“It’s very early in the process and there’s nothing more we have to release yet,” said spokesman Ray Gomez. “We are obviously looking into this and cooperating fully with OSHA.”

The boy had been sharing a Car Toon Spin “taxi” with his mother. The ride uses a lap bar, a padded device that fits across passengers’ laps to keep them inside.

Rider behavior, not mechanical failure, is blamed in 90% of theme park accidents, and millions of customers are protected by lap bars and other types of simple restraints at parks and fairs across the country. Lap bars can work well on many rides, experts said, and when used properly, they keep passengers from rising more than an inch out of their seats. They have not been identified as a contributing factor in Friday’s accident.

“When appropriate for a given ride, lap bars have been proven to be safe and effective,” said Thomas Sheehan, president of Amusement Industry Manufacturers & Suppliers International, the nation’s largest nonprofit association of ride manufacturers.

But they have been blamed in several accidents in recent years, and some within the industry consider lap bars problematic in certain kinds of rides, especially turbulent ones. That can be especially true, experts said Sunday, when an adult is sharing a seat with a child, because the bar can tighten across the adult’s lap but leave plenty of room for a child to wiggle free.

In Friday’s accident, Cal/OSHA Director John Howard said, the little boy was sitting next to his mother.

“There is no way that a lap bar that fits over an adult is going to properly restrain a child,” said Ken Martin, a Virginia state ride inspector and safety expert for more than 20 years. “These lap bars are kind of generic. . . . Obviously, that lap bar is not going to be snug and tight on a child.”

A series of incidents have brought the debate over safety restraints--and lap bars in particular--percolating to the surface.

“This is a chronic problem in the industry,” said Kathy Fackler, a La Jolla mother whose son’s foot was crushed on Disneyland’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad in 1998. Fackler blames the lap bars for her son’s accident. She was sitting next to him as the ride was slowing and says the lap bar was snug on her lap but not on his. Her son, thinking the ride was over, was able to turn under the lap bar and step free of the ride.

She filed a claim with the park, which was settled in January 1999.

Fackler has since launched a campaign to improve theme park safety--and has included several letters of warning about lap bars to Disney officials, she said.

“This is not a hidden problem at all. Kids slide under and around these things, and it’s a common cause of injuries.”

In 1998, a 15-year-old Texas girl died at the Austin-Travis County Livestock Show and Rodeo when a lap bar apparently released and she was thrown into a wall.

Prosecutors, who brought unprecedented indictments against amusement company executives after the accident, charged that the ride was operated too fast, that the lap bar was fastened by a pin that was too small and that the lap bar’s latch was weak.

A U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission report describes at least 11 theme park accidents involving either death or injury--and lap bars, but does not make clear over what period of time those occurred.

Al Lutz, creator of an unofficial Internet site on Disneyland, said Sunday that he thinks the spinning mechanism on the Roger Rabbit ride makes the lap bar insufficient. The park should have compensated, he argues, by adding doors on both sides of the passenger cars. The Roger Rabbit cars have a door on only one side, allowing passengers to slide in and out easily when they are getting on and off the ride. Building doors on both sides, Lutz said, would have slowed the park’s ability to load passengers.

“If they don’t have that car loaded and off within a minute, they have to shut the ride down, because there are too many cars coming down the line,” he said. “They are always under pressure to keep it moving.”

Richard Harris, an amusement-ride safety consultant for more than 20 years and a resident of Yorba Linda, also suggested that a second door could make such rides safer.

Typically, experts say, an adult riding with a small child sits next to the open side of the ride car. While seldom made into formal policy, they said, it’s a rule of thumb at most amusement parks.

“One of the first rules when you are dealing with cars that spin around is always load the larger person on the outside,” Martin said.

“You always put the larger person on the exit side,” agreed Edward Pribonic, an engineer in the theme park industry for 30 years. Pribonic, of Seal Beach, was manager of engineering and architecture at Disneyland, and later senior design manager for Walt Disney Imagineering.

“That way, the smaller person is contained and has nowhere to go,” Pribonic said.

According to a Disneyland employee interviewed Saturday, the child injured Friday was sitting next to the open side of the car. Cal/OSHA officials have not confirmed that report.

Pribonic also said industry experts are well aware that a single lap bar restraint system does not necessarily secure an adult and a child at the same time. But adding dual lap bars can be problematic too, he said, because they can pinch riders or leave a small rider stuck in the middle.

“There’s always a trade-off,” he said. “It complicates the ride and it doesn’t always make it safer.”

In an April 2000 incident on the Car Toon Spin, a 13-year-old Lake Forest girl’s right leg became lodged under the fiberglass passenger bucket. The girl was able to climb out of her seat while the ride was moving, Disney officials said at the time, while she was trying to reclaim a stuffed animal that had fallen from the taxi.

The girl’s injuries were not serious, and she was treated and released from an Anaheim hospital.

Disneyland spokesman Gomez said Sunday that this weekend’s accident was unrelated to the April accident.

The distinguishing factor, he explained, was the age of the children. He would not elaborate.

“We believe these are two totally unrelated and distinct episodes,” he said. “One accident involved a 4-year-old child and the other involved a [teen].”

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Contributing to this report were staff writers Jerry Hicks, H.G. Reza, staff researcher John Jackson and correspondent Theresa Moreau.

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