Almost any amusement park feels well-planned when you walk in on a summer Saturday, with children running toward the tallest coaster in the distance and the aroma of funnel cake filling the air. created. secure. The level of scrutiny that is applied to that coaster before it opens each morning depends almost entirely on geography, something that most families are unaware of and that the industry has spent decades making sure they don’t think too much about.
A state-certified ride inspector in New Jersey has probably seen every inch of that track. No one was obliged to do so in Wyoming. That’s not a small difference. People have fallen through the gap because it is sufficiently wide. In actuality.
That was brutally evident in the summer of 2016. A 10-year-old boy named Caleb Schwab was killed in Kansas on the tallest water slide in the world at the time. This type of attraction is known for its gasps and long lines of people. According to reports, the harness had come loose during earlier travels. Around the same time, three young girls were thrown more than thirty feet to the ground when a Ferris wheel gondola in Tennessee flipped. One was six years old. She sustained a traumatic brain injury. Worn rivet fasteners on the carriage’s underside are the culprit. The kind of thing that a qualified inspector might have discovered if they had been looking in the right spot.
According to Saferparks, a nonprofit that has been monitoring this for years, there are no laws at all requiring ride inspections in six states: Mississippi, Alabama, Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah. In those locations, the insurance company is usually the only one pressuring operators to check their vehicles. This implies that those who determine liability costs are also the ones who set the safety bar. Under the guise of oversight, that is a conflict of interest.
The disparity is shocking even in states with inspection requirements. In Kansas, amusement parks are permitted to use private, licensed inspectors to conduct self-inspections; the state only randomly audits the paperwork, not the rides. Similar actions are taken in Tennessee. These systems might function most of the time. Additionally, when a child is strapped in, “most of the time” might not be sufficient.
At the opposite end is New Jersey. Regular inspections are carried out by engineers and inspectors with state training. Over 1,000 skilled inspectors are part of Pennsylvania’s network. These states have consciously decided that the people who make money from ticket sales shouldn’t be solely responsible for public safety on amusement rides. It’s hard to defend the contrast with the patchwork everywhere else.
Naturally, the industry disapproves of that framing. Since 1999, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions has spent about $11 million lobbying Congress, arguing that a federal inspection program would be too expensive for taxpayers and that injuries are uncommon. There is a bit of truth hidden there: the likelihood of suffering a serious injury while riding is actually quite low, at about one in eighteen million. However, that statistic is an average across highly disparate systems. Nothing about the particular risk of riding in a state where no credentialed person has seen the equipment is disclosed.
The fact that no one is even gathering reliable data makes the problem more difficult to resolve. Riding injuries are not routinely monitored by any national agency. Tens of thousands of ER visits are estimated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which lost control over permanent park rides in 1981 due to industry lobbying. However, these figures are based on hospital samples and do not provide a full picture. After years of data analysis, Dr. Gary Smith of Nationwide Children’s Hospital stated unequivocally, “This is a public health problem, and we need to treat it like a public health problem.” He advocated for a national strategy for gathering data. That was almost ten years ago. The patchwork is still there.
The unsettling logic at the heart of it all is difficult to ignore. The industry claims that because states are aware of their own attractions, local regulation is the most effective. However, the states with the least amount of oversight continue to have fatalities and injuries. Regulatory jurisdiction is not a concern for the families who put their children on those rides on a sweltering July afternoon. They have faith that someone, somewhere, looked into it.
