The notebook was once something completely different. Perhaps a grocery list or a spot for the children to write during lengthy car rides. By the third weekend of June, it had evolved into something more bizarre: a running log of every broken harness, every teenage operator who was preoccupied, and every queue sign that had a missing height marker that Daniel and Renata Brooks saw while visiting amusement parks in southern Ontario with their two kids. This was not what they had planned. It just kind of happened, like habits do when you start focusing on something that most people ignore.
According to Renata, a former hospital administrator, it started in the middle of late May. Without checking a single lap bar, a seventeen-year-old ride attendant waved a group of kids onto a spinning ride. Daniel also saw it. They remained silent at the moment, but Renata took out a pen during the drive home. The notebook had seventy-three entries by Labor Day. Not every one of them was a legal infraction. Some were judgment calls, minor errors that a regulator could ignore. Others were more difficult to ignore.
For this kind of thing, Ontario has one of the strictest frameworks in North America. The Technical Standards and Safety Act governs amusement devices, and each ride requires a current TSSA permit before it can rotate once. Mechanics must be certified, operators must conduct daily inspections, and the agency conducts periodic inspections. It works on paper. Just 4% of the 902 incidents that the TSSA recorded at the province’s outdoor attractions in 2016 were related to operator or owner errors. Statistically speaking, the odds are comforting: the likelihood of suffering a serious injury on a fixed-site ride is about one in sixteen million, which is less than your chance of being struck by lightning.
However, when you’re waiting in line to see your eight-year-old’s harness click shut, statistics provide an odd sense of solace. The Brookses began taking pictures. A small fair near Barrie had a rust patch on one of the support beams. The whole safety briefing is being texted by a go-kart attendant. A waterslide where the height requirement that was posted had been erased and rewritten in marker. By themselves, none of these are disastrous. The project was unsettling in part because of this. Their list of infractions wasn’t particularly noteworthy. They were commonplace, piling up, and simple to overlook if you weren’t looking.
Speaking with them gives me the impression that the documentation evolved into a kind of parenting in and of itself. According to Daniel, most operators are not careless. He believes they’re worn out. Seasonal employees are underpaid, owners are overworked, and the equipment is subjected to 100,000 cycles during the summer. For years, Kathryn Woodcock, who oversees the THRILL lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, has maintained that ride safety is just as dependent on the person seated next to you as it is on the engineering. The long way around, the Brookses reached a similar conclusion.
They sent the TSSA an overview of their notes at the end of the summer. Although the organization does have a public hotline for complaints of this nature, they have not received a response. It’s unclear if anything came of it. The system can bite when it wants to, as demonstrated by the 2015 case in which a water park operator was fined $400,000 following severe slide injuries. The Brookses’ notebook might wind up unread in a file somewhere. It might not, too.
Observing them turn the pages, what sticks out is how unremarkable the majority of the entries are. A screw is loose. A bored waiter. A sign made a wrong turn. little things. The kind you only notice when you’ve made the decision to stop averting your gaze, for whatever reason.
