Thrill Rides’ Safety Limits
Theme parks put all kinds of restrictions on thrill rides: height, age, medical conditions. Now they may have to add weight and girth because of an apparent connection between the size of customers and recent accidents.
Amusement park rides invite people to throw caution to the wind, but along with the pursuit of a thrill comes a reasonable expectation of safety for the rider. The death of a substantially overweight woman on a water ride at Knott’s Berry Farm last month--and accidents at other parks on rides made by the same manufacturer--show what can happen when there isn’t a posted weight restriction, sufficient warning or more explicit instructions from the ride’s designer about the range of people who can ride safely.
The ride where the woman died did have restraints--a lap bar and seat belt. But they didn’t do the job. It turns out that the industry knows all about the limits of its equipment, but such information isn’t necessarily conveyed to customers. If the industry continues to argue “rider responsibility” at the same time it stonewalls on accident reporting requirements, it only will invite what it has successfully avoided to date: federal oversight.
In both the Knott’s Berry Farm death and an injury to an overweight man on a roller coaster in New York in 1999, all the important information came out after the accidents: for example, that a ride is designed for a person weighing an average of about 175 pounds.
For a woman weighing 292 pounds, with a girth of 56 inches, as in the case of the Knott’s rider, it would be “difficult if not impossible” for a lap bar and seat belt to work in a ride that drops 115 feet at speeds of up to 50 mph, says the manufacturer, Maryland-based Intamin AG.
In that accident, the manufacturer blames the theme park for not heeding a general warning in the manual; the park says its employees followed all the manufacturer’s instructions. All of this paves the way for ultimately assigning blame to the victim. And that’s just what the manufacturer did when it pointed out that there was a grab bar available as a backup.
Park visitors need sufficient information about individual rides to assess risk and perhaps decide to avoid some. State regulators now say they are looking at requiring weight warning signs. But it cannot be just the riders’ responsibility. If the ride can’t protect people on the margins of size, height or weight, operators should not allow them to board.
