It wasn’t inspection schedules or rules that Chris Evins was thinking about when he reached back to hold down a screaming girl on the Mamba roller coaster at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City last October. He was thinking about how to keep someone from jumping off a ride in the middle of a drop. That moment—raw, physical, and almost unbelievable—became the picture that people now use to talk about whether Missouri’s approach to amusement ride safety really works or is just a way to check a box.
When the facts came out in early November, they made people feel bad. A visitor emailed Missouri’s Division of Fire Safety because her son’s lap belt on the Mamba wouldn’t lock properly. It was checked by an inspector the next morning, who found that more than twenty lap belts or seatbelt retractors were not working as they should. The ride had a red tag on it. Things were fixed. It was running again by that evening. When it comes to the facts, the whole thing was clean. When it comes to people, it brings up questions that are hard to answer.
The Mamba had been checked out last in April and passed. That’s what the law in Missouri says has to happen: once a year, by a qualified inspector, and the permit is good for twelve months. The system thinks that a single review once a year is enough to find mechanical problems before they become emergencies. In theory, it seems like a good assumption. Between April and October, a lot of bad things can happen in the background.
It seems like the real danger is in the time between inspections as we watch this story play out. Broken parts don’t wear out at set times. Lap belt retractor parts break down over time; springs lose their tension, and small parts fail one at a time until they’re all broken. It’s not a question of whether or not the April inspection was done right; no problems were reported. The question is whether the fact that there are no problems in the spring can tell you anything about what will happen in the fall, after a full season of heavy use.
According to Missouri’s Amusement Ride Safety Act, riders must follow both written and spoken instructions. The Division of Fire Safety is in charge of the state’s inspection system. That’s more than some states give out. At the moment, six states don’t have any control over fixed amusement parks. In Missouri at least there is a plan. A framework is only as strong as the assumptions that go into it, and every year there should be an inspection, but staff ignores a couple’s account of hearing a bloodcurdling scream on the first drop.
It seemed like the staff didn’t care, as Cassie Evins put it. That opinion, whether it’s true or not, shows something that rules alone can’t: the culture on the ground, how front-line workers handle complaints, and how much a park sees a guest’s complaint as a data point worth acting on rather than an issue to be dealt with. The official statement from Worlds of Fun emphasized the ride’s multi-layered safety system and that it met all safety standards. That’s probably all true legally. Still doesn’t explain why two guests told a supervisor about the problem directly in October and why the belts were still breaking when a state inspector arrived weeks later.
It’s still not clear if this event will lead to a formal effort to change Missouri’s inspection rules. A lot of the time, regulations move slowly, and amusement parks have long said that their safety record shows that the way things are done now is good enough. The average number of deaths in amusement parks each year across the country is about 2.5. This is a very low number, considering the huge number of people who visit parks every year.
People think about statistics and stories in different ways, though. One screaming child on the first drop changes how people think about the game more than years of good injury data. Their lawmakers and the Division of Fire Safety may decide that the Mamba incident, no matter how quickly it was fixed, leaves a question that can’t be answered by a regular inspection schedule every year.
