There’s California, and Then There’s Disneyland

Welcome aboard, everyone, on California’s newest adventure attraction--the Big Dark!

Take your seats, and our Night Vision attendants will secure your lap bars. You’re about to embark on a full-scream-ahead journey through the Golden State’s energy crisis.

Pass dangerously close to terrifyingly expensive restaurants where real energy company lobbyists eat consumers for lunch!

Glide silently through the dollar-bill-green Assembly chambers and the deficit-red state Senate, where some of the same politicians who voted unanimously for deregulation five years ago are now desperately struggling to undo it, so you’ll vote for them again!

Tiptoe through the horrifying PG&E; billing chamber, where you’ll be haunted by the tortured cries of customers ripping open their latest power bills!

And most frightening of all--you never know when the lights will go out!

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Let’s say for a moment that California really is a theme park (it’s not that much of a stretch). It would offer some pleasant and unchallenging rides like Picnic in February, and some really scary ones.

The Big Dark wasn’t meant to be a dangerous ride; deregulation was supposed to be G-rated for risk. But now the Legislature’s energineers are there under the chassis, banging and squinting at deregulation’s undercarriage, so nobody will get hurt again.

Disney’s California theme park, called California Adventure, opens this week. Its perils are more contrived than real; that’s what people pay for. But life is a ride, and all rides are risky, even in “the happiest place on Earth.”

California Adventure opens one year, one month and one week after a law started requiring that the messy consequences of risk be reported to the state. The law is there because state Sen. Tom Torlakson, an Antioch Democrat, took up the matter of ride safety after a teenager was killed in a Northern California water slide accident. Soon, he got a look at the size of the glacier he intended to climb.

Led by Disney, California theme parks had fought regulation for 30 years, bill after bill, session after session. Thirty-eight other states regulated their amusement parks, but most of them didn’t have Disney to contend with. (In Florida, that other happiest place on Earth, big companies like Universal and Disney still get to regulate themselves.)

The bill became law on the heels of a fatal Disneyland accident in December 1998. Disney immediately called paramedics but not police. When Anaheim police did arrive, they politely cooled their heels in the office for 90 minutes while Disney staff brought witnesses to them. (Imagine that happening at, say, an industrial explosion.) And in the meantime, park employees had mopped up the scene. They probably referred to it as a “mess.” A cop would call it “evidence.”

Maybe the bill would have passed without that incident, but it showed unmistakably how much Disney really believes the “land” part of “Disneyland,” some fantasy nation-state operating by its own rules.

The first head-butting under the new law came after a little boy was brain-damaged after falling from a Disneyland ride last September. The state won: Investigators marched in and, three months later, ordered Disney to make design and safety changes.

In Torlakson’s assessment, the year-old law “has already had a major impact.” He is now looking into the effects of G-forces on rides. Europe’s amusement parks, he says, already have G-force standards, and maybe--although Torlakson doesn’t know for sure--Euro Disney is among them.

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Like child abuse and wife-beating, crimes that used to be shrugged off as family matters, the question now arises about theme parks: Are there more accidents, or just more thorough reporting of the ones that happen, now that the law requires it?

I expect it’s the latter. Somewhere around six or seven theme-park accidents out of 10 are at least partly the patron’s fault--a kid squirms out of reach, a parent looks away, a teenager shows off, someone gets drunk or loaded and climbs aboard.

Whatever the reason and whoever is at fault, a ride’s safety should be as easy to assess as reading the contents of a can of green beans. The Web site https://www.saferparks.org has taken it upon itself to do just that, in part on the theory that better reporting makes better parks and better patrons.

Surely even Mickey Mouse wouldn’t object to that.

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Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com