A local building inspector in Virginia is in charge of approving the safety of an amusement ride that throws people through corkscrews at a speed of seventy miles per hour. Every bolt and harness in Pennsylvania is examined by over a thousand state-trained inspectors and engineers. There is absolutely no state oversight in Mississippi. Not a minor oversight. Not very little supervision. Not one. This may be the most unsettling fact about the American amusement park industry: the location where you purchase your ticket largely determines how thoroughly the ride’s potential for death was examined.
Congress deprived the Consumer Product Safety Commission of its jurisdiction over fixed-site amusement parks in 1981, which is where this regulatory patchwork originated. Since its founding in 1972, the CPSC has regulated both permanent parks and traveling carnivals; however, the legal landscape was complicated by two contradictory court decisions in Texas. Congress intervened to provide clarification. As it turned out, the clarification meant that permanent parks—the world’s Six Flags and Cedar Points—were left to the states. The flimsy Ferris wheels at county fairs and traveling carnival rides are still subject to federal regulation. It’s difficult to miss the irony. Federal attention is drawn to the makeshift setup bolted together in a parking lot. This is not the case with the multimillion-dollar coaster situated on reinforced concrete.
Decades of industry lobbying to maintain that situation ensued. The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions has long maintained that state authorities are better suited to oversee their own parks and that a federal program would cost taxpayers millions of dollars while addressing an issue that the industry maintains hardly exists. According to their statistics, there is a one in twenty-four million chance of suffering a serious injury while riding. Are you dying? One in 750 million. When you discover that less than half of eligible parks even submitted data for the survey from which those figures originated, those numbers may seem comforting. The industry seems to be grading its own assignments and using the outcomes as evidence of superiority.
For years, Ken Martin, a Richmond, Virginia-based amusement ride safety consultant, has been one of the most vocal opponents. He has noted that fifty states have fifty different ways of regulating rides, with fifty different types of agencies in charge. It’s the Department of Agriculture in some states. The Department of Labor in others. Texas assigns the task to the Department of Insurance, which only mandates an annual inspection by the park’s insurance provider. Rosa Ayala-Goana died in 2013 after falling 75 feet from the Texas Giant at Six Flags Over Texas; the park was not even obliged to provide the state with a report detailing the incident. The death was investigated by Arlington police, but the ride itself was not. The most important questions just drifted by without a response.
In the meantime, Florida, which is home to some of the world’s most popular parks, Walt Disney World, and Universal Studios, has created an incredible loophole. State-run safety inspections do not apply to parks with more than a thousand employees. The largest operations in the state report injuries according to their own policies, effectively policing themselves. Given the sheer number of visitors, the parks with the least amount of external scrutiny are also the ones most likely to experience incidents, which makes it difficult to ignore the circular logic at work.
At the other extreme are Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which have strict state inspection programs with qualified engineers who physically inspect rides prior to their opening. These states handle amusement safety in the manner that most people believe all states do. They don’t. There is a huge gap between what tourists envision and what is actually in place, and either federal action or an abrupt wave of coordinated state-level reform would be necessary to close it. Neither seems very likely. Since Senator Edward Markey’s repeated attempts to reinstate CPSC authority in the early 2000s, Congress has shown little interest in the fight, and the industry prefers things as they are. The next family in line has no easy way of knowing which version of safety they’re getting, so the patchwork continues ride by ride, state by state.
