When a county fair is still being set up, you can smell diesel fuel, sawdust, and a faintly mechanical smell. At six in the morning, the midway isn’t glamorous. With clipboards and flashlights, workers are crawling over partially assembled rides, checking bolts, tugging on cables, and listening for noises that shouldn’t be there. The majority of attendees will never witness any of this. Arriving at noon, they will turn in their wristbands and have faith that someone, somewhere, has ensured the machine that is spinning their children forty feet in the air is stable.
In Pennsylvania, that trust is supported by a formal framework. A certified examiner from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture must inspect every traveling ride before it can open at the York Fair. These are not informal tours. The Department claims that inspections adhere to the particular standards established by each ride’s manufacturing engineer. This means that the person inspecting your Tilt-A-Whirl is using the same technical document that the original manufacturers used. Every year, over 10,000 rides are assessed by about 1,400 inspectors throughout the entire state. That seems like a serious operation on paper.
The York State Fair in 2021 purposefully leaned toward this. Two full-time inspectors who worked rotating shifts were brought in by Strates Shows Inc., the company operating the midway that year. Their show coordinator, Barry Schaible, explained how his crew would go through each ride from top to bottom in the morning before a single rider stepped on it.
Inspection forms were completed and turned in. If something seemed off, such as a grinding sound, a strange vibration, or anything that didn’t feel right, workers on the rides themselves had the standing authority to shut it down in the middle of operation. It wouldn’t matter if there were 100,000 people waiting. It sounds almost too good, but it’s important to remember that they were probably extra cautious because of what had happened two years earlier.
Because 2019 had an impact. Two people were hurt on a Friday night near the end of the York Fair by a Ferris wheel that belonged to Florida-based Deggeller Attractions and was approved by the Department of Agriculture on the first day of the event. From a gondola, one man fell about twenty-five feet. While still seated inside, another was injured. A loose tie rod and a malfunctioning hairpin on the gondola were discovered during the subsequent investigation. basic hardware. This is the type of item that is likely examined during inspections. The idea that a ride can pass all necessary reviews and then, ten days later, break down in a way that requires hospitalization is still a little unsettling.
While the investigation was underway, the Department of Agriculture and the fair kept quiet about specifics. The ride manufacturer, the operator, and the inspector who had cleared the wheel were all named in the federal lawsuit that ultimately resulted from what transpired. The final section is important. After a ride passes inspection, the question of “what broke” changes to “who bears responsibility for not seeing it.”
In this country, traveling carnival rides occupy an odd legal space. In contrast to permanent amusement parks, which are subject to more regular federal scrutiny, mobile fairs are subject to state-level oversight, which varies greatly in terms of resources and rigor. Although Pennsylvania’s system is better organized than many other states, it still has a limited staff to handle a massive amount of equipment.
Observing how fairs discuss safety following an incident gives the impression that public assurances are more automatic than operational adjustments. Protocols for inspection are cited. An announcement is made about new contractors. The language becomes cautious. The music then begins, the lights come back on, and everyone re-lines up. which, to be honest, is probably what the majority of people desire. Most of the rides are secure. Inspections identify the majority of issues. However, “mostly” is doing a lot of silent work in that sentence, and it’s important to keep in mind that York’s Ferris wheel passed inspection in 2019.
