Sunday, July 20, 2008
News

Amusement ride incidents raise safety concerns

 

Peter Brandt/Getty Images
A series of accidents involving amusement park rides has sparked discussions on safety and regulations.
By Mark Woolsey
 
A swing ride malfunctioned at a carnival in Loganville in early July, throwing a man into the air and sending him crashing down on a fence. He was taken to the hospital with cuts and back pain, according to the amusement park ride-monitoring Web site Amusementsafety.org.

Only weeks before, a 17-year-old boy who jumped fences into a restricted area was decapitated by the Six Flags Over Georgia Batman ride on June 28.

There has been a series of amusement ride-related accidents in Georgia in the past couple of years, but determining the extent of the problem, or indeed whether there is a safety problem, is difficult. State of Georgia officials don’t keep a comprehensive database of such accidents.

“This is an atypical occurrence,” says state Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, under whose jurisdiction amusement ride regulation falls. “People are injured from time to time, and it’s a rare occurrence. Our mission is to try to prevent injures and accidents from occurring. But literally tens of thousands of people seek out amusement parks and carnivals.”

In the June mishap, the Springfield, S.C. youth, who was at the park with his family on a church outing, scaled both perimeter and interior fences with a male companion and blew past multiple signs that read: “Danger Zone, Do Not Enter/Authorized Personnel Only.” A statement from park officials sheds no light on the boy’s motive, saying some witnesses reported he was trying to retrieve something he had lost, while others said he was trying to touch the ride. A police report said the dead teen and his friend were taking a shortcut back into the park after lunch. The 17-year-old was killed instantly, investigators say.

“Safety and security is always our top priority at Six Flags Over Georgia,” PR manager Hela Sheth said in a news release. “We have always had an excellent safety record.”
  

Nonetheless, state labor officials saw a need for greater oversight. Temporarily shuttering the ride, they issued a slate of recommendations, including that the number and size of signs be increased and the message changed to read “extreme danger.” Although both signage and inner-perimeter fencing meet American Society for Testing and Materials standards, the officials suggested that a more effective barrier to access be installed. Thurmond’s office also recommended round-the-clock security surveillance until the changes are in place.

Six Flags officials say they will comply with the recommendations.


SAFE AND SECURE?

    Federally supplied data says regulation in Georgia requires annual permits for all amusement devices and proof of a minimum of $500,000 in insurance for bodily injury liability coverage for fixed-location rides like those at theme parks. Carnivals, whose rides are put up and taken down regularly as they move from town to town, in many cases crossing state lines, are required to carry $1 million in insurance. Rides are inspected at first “set-up” each year and spot-checked thereafter, according to information supplied by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

“I am not aware of any inordinate number of safety violations,” Thurman says of ride safety in Georgia. “Obviously, amusement and park owners want to maintain a safe and secure environment. It’s good business.”
    

But a listing of amusement ride accidents and data provided by federal consumer product officials suggests that the environment hasn’t always been a safe, secure one.
    

CPSC spokeswoman Nychelle Fleming says the Commission’s data shows 18,776 hospital emergency room visits in 2007 as a result of mishaps involving fixed rises, mobile rides, inflatable rides and coin-operated and free attractions in places such as shopping centers. Those numbers are up from 2006, when 17,767 visits were recorded.

Overall, though, says Fleming, accident trends were fairly static in the period from 1997 to 2004, with the exception of a significant jump in inflatable accidents. She attributes that to the increased availability and popularity of the air-filled toys.
   

The CPSC has jurisdiction over mobile rides at the federal level, but not fixed theme-park rides (the so-called roller-coaster exemption). Fleming says there have been “a couple” of recalls of mobile rides in the past, but critics say enforcement has been lax in recent years, particularly during the Bush presidency.
   

The Web sites Amusementsafety.org and Rideaccident.com recount that in August of 2006, a 13-year-old girl was thrown 60 feet from the Orbiter ride at a fair in Augusta, Ga., and was seriously injured. In July of the same year, a man died of a heart attack after riding the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia; however, the death was later determined the result of a pre-existing medical condition.
   

In April of this year, a carnival worker was seriously hurt when he fell 45 feet from the outside of a Roll-O-Plane carnival ride set up at Plaza Fiesta on Buford Highway.


BETTER THAN AVERAGE

    The debate is ongoing. Park and carnival operators say their safety record has been a good one, and that they have been diligent about complying with applicable safety, inspection, training and regulation requirements. Critics charge that the ride and carnival industry has spent millions on lobbying to influence theme park safety regulations, and that enforcement has been weak as a result. Oversight of theme parks and carnivals, they say, has been left to individual state programs, some with no teeth to enforce regulations.

Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case in Georgia. A map of amusement ride regulations state-by-state on CPSC’s Web site identifies Georgia as one of 39 states with state, local and private inspections and/or insurance. Three other states require private inspections and/or insurance. Nine states have no regulation or inspection requirements.

Sam Hall of the Georgia Department of Labor says that the state has a safety engineering team that inspects both fixed rides and carnival rides, with the authority to shut down rides or impose fines for failure to follow state law or carry out mandated results of safety inspections. The ride in the Loganville accident, for example, was shut down so that the carnival could comply with recommendations and pass a new safety inspection. “We do have more stringent rules and regulations than other states,” Hall says.

Kathy Fackler, president of the nonprofit safety, monitoring and advocacy group Saferparks.org, concurs, noting that Georgia has both government inspections and government accident investigations. “Georgia has a pretty decent set-up of regulations on the books,” she says. “I would say it’s better than average.” 

But, she says, a database of amusement ride accidents would help a lot. When she requests information about such incidents, she has to know beforehand which ones to query about, whereas other states hand over a sheaf of reports. "I'd like to see greater transparency there," she says. SP