A photograph of the Verrückt waterslide rising 17 stories above Schlitterbahn in Kansas City, Kansas, can be found somewhere in the public record. It is massive, unlikely, and almost purposefully intimidating against a flat Midwestern sky. That picture went viral when it opened in 2014. People were thrilled. A few were anxious. Essentially, the point was that tension, that specific blend of excitement and slight fear. Nobody anticipated it turning into something completely different.
Ten-year-old Caleb Schwab passed away on that slide on August 7, 2016. He was the son of a state representative from Kansas. What transpired with him was not a quiet tragedy—a detail too horrifying for most publications to print plainly. In the same way that deaths involving children and institutional failure often become, it became loud, public, and extremely uncomfortable. In a matter of days, a question that safety advocates had been posing for years finally gained traction: precisely who is in charge of ensuring that these rides do not result in fatalities?
It turned out that the solution was so convoluted that it ought to have alarmed everyone more than it did. Because of a 1981 amendment buried in an appropriations bill, the federal government regulates traveling carnival rides but not permanent amusement parks. A baby stroller is subject to stricter federal safety regulations than a rollercoaster carrying a child at more than 100 miles per hour, according to Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who had been advocating for federal oversight of amusement rides for years. It’s not overstated. It was simply the law.
Like the majority of states, Kansas technically mandated yearly inspections for operators. However, the state hardly ever conducted compliance audits. The Verræt slide required a county zoning waiver and some structural inspections, but no government agency had ever approved the ride’s safety for people traveling down a 169-foot drop at 65 miles per hour.
Later, a criminal indictment claimed that experts had discovered evidence indicating other rafts had gone airborne prior to Caleb’s death, colliding with overhead poles and netting, and that the perpetrators might have withheld information from investigators. That indictment claimed that the ride broke almost all long-standing industry safety regulations.
Calls for federal oversight were met with resistance from the amusement park industry. The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions’ Paul Noland contended that the current system was effective, that major injuries were uncommon, and that the Verrückt story’s widespread media coverage demonstrated how uncommon such incidents were. It’s hard to completely reject that argument. According to statistics, dying on an amusement ride is incredibly rare—much less common than getting struck by lightning. Engineers examine every bolt and hydraulic line, private insurance companies dispatch auditors, and ASTM International has been improving safety procedures since 1898. Those standards are written by over 900 scientists and engineers.
However, this is what worried safety advocates back then and continues to do: adherence to those standards is essentially optional. No park operator is being compelled to follow them. A self-selected group of parks that volunteer their numbers for an industry-sponsored survey provides the injury data used by the industry. Only 100 hospitals nationwide provide emergency room data for researchers attempting to create an independent picture of amusement park safety. It’s difficult to have faith in a system that isn’t even able to measure itself.
Observing this debate unfold over the years since 2016 gives the impression that both sides are arguing past one another in good faith. The industry genuinely thinks that its internal standards are strict. Safety advocates sincerely think that “rigorous” can mean whatever an operator decides it means on a particular afternoon in the absence of enforceable oversight. The passing of Caleb Schwab did not settle that dispute. It forced the nation to endure the discomfort of not having a suitable response, and as it turns out, that discomfort is still present.⁖※
