It was a harvest festival in South Jersey, the kind of October weekend that seems completely typical, complete with food vendors, pumpkins, and a field full of spinning rides. The age of Hailey McMullen was ten. She started using a device known as the “Super Sizzler,” and she never got off. She was ejected by the ride. Despite being airlifted to the hospital, she did not make it. It was nearly impossible to reconcile for a state that ride safety experts frequently describe as having some of the strictest laws in the country.
The Department of Community Affairs in New Jersey is in charge of all amusement rides in the state. They are required to conduct yearly inspections, but they are also free to appear at any time during the season without warning. Over 12,000 portable and stationary rides were inspected by 19 inspectors last year, which is three times the number of inspections conducted by the state in 1997, when there were only nine inspectors.
Since their peak in 2006, violations have been on the decline. According to legal counsel for the New Jersey Amusement Association, state engineers are required to personally review and approve designs for any new ride that is not yet licensed in New Jersey. This requirement is unique in the nation. Lary Zucker, who has seen the state’s oversight infrastructure develop over the course of two decades, stated that “New Jersey is considered the gold standard.” And yet. The machine that killed the child had been doing this for years.
Ken Martin, a ride safety expert from Virginia, has been observing how different states manage this patchwork of carnival oversight for a long time, and his assessment is measured but unsettling. Every state creates its own regulations. Some have strong frameworks for inspections. Others hardly have any frameworks at all.
As a result, there is a system in place across the nation where a spinning machine’s safety at a county fair is largely dependent on which side of a state line it is operating on. According to data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, U.S. emergency rooms treated an estimated 34,200 injuries from amusement rides each year between 2021 and 2023. The majority of these injuries were caused by compliance gaps rather than engineering flaws.
The “Super Sizzler” was not a brand-new issue. Since 2004, similar rides have resulted in at least 11 injuries. In December 2005, a nine-year-old girl from Austin passed away after falling under a lap bar and being flung onto the ride platform. A seven-year-old boy in Arkansas perished in 2007 after he and his mother fell from a Sizzler. Two boys were thrown from a similar ride at the Kentucky Mercer County Fair that same year. A sixteen-year-old in Texas was expelled and killed in 2016.
After a boy from Kentucky was thrown and hit in the head, the Colorado-based manufacturer Wisdom Rides released a bulletin in 2007 advising owners to install seat belts. On the other hand, seat belts are not required. “They’ve had a problem with these rides spinning too fast,” Martin stated. They also need to be installed correctly for them to function, and there’s no guarantee that anyone is checking across a disjointed national system. “Without a seat belt, there’s a possibility it could throw someone out.”
It’s difficult to ignore that statement for even a brief moment. a manufacturer’s voluntary bulletin, a known issue, and a known solution. Ten years later, a ten-year-old is airlifted from a festival field in New Jersey. Following Hailey McMullen’s death, the DCA acted swiftly, directing the closure of all comparable rides in the state while the investigation was ongoing. The infrastructure of New Jersey is indicated by that response. It is unable to explain why a machine with this particular background continued to function for twenty years under the same unofficial protections.
It’s important to comprehend the bigger picture. The F24 Committee of ASTM International upholds the engineering standards that are used as a benchmark by the majority of serious manufacturers, insurers, and regulators. These standards cover everything from daily inspection checklists and operator training to structural integrity and restraint systems. These standards are directly mentioned in about 85% of U.S. states that have regulations pertaining to fixed-site amusement parks. However, traveling carnival rides are in a different, more ambiguous category. There are standards. When the ride is put together in a different field every weekend, it is more difficult to enforce compliance.
Observing all of this, it seems that the system functions best in permanent parks and struggles most at the periphery, such as county fairs, harvest festivals, and temporary setups where a ride opens on Friday morning and spins paying patrons by Friday evening. The gold standard might be New Jersey. The cause of Hailey McMullen’s death is still being looked into. Both of these statements are simultaneously true, and the most accurate way to characterize the current state of amusement ride safety in the United States is probably this tension.⁖※
