Okay, okay, okay... whoa there, hold on everyone.

This is going to be a bit long, so there is your warning, but...

Federal oversight is absolutely pointless in themed and amusement entertainment and would not have helped prevent this at all. Using accidents like this to call for better federal or state oversight is not something that would work.

Now, before I go on, I worked in management in themed entertainment for a decent period of time, I still know people within those positions, and I am still well aware of the industry. Heck, I was posting a bunch of coaster pics in the MGC thread to amuse myself earlier today.

With that having been said, there is this great media belief that people are attracted to the danger of different rides, and the more dangerous they are the more people want to go on them.

This. Is. Completely. False.

People want to go on rides for the *illusion* of danger, not actual danger. Maybe that was a thing in the 1920s when they made rides that were so crazy violent, but today - that is simply not a thing.

First, today's society is extremely litigious. And with rides like this, even in the industry, I think that's a good thing. But let's break down this cost for a moment. The family is getting $20 million from the park (and in almost all cases, parks are self-insured - interestingly, in this case apparently they aren't, but even so, it's a big cost for that insurance then). I don't know what it cost to build, but let's say it was $2 million, which is probably cheaper than it would have been. A ticket for the park is $55 at the high end. The last stats I have is that Schlitterbahn hosted 560,000 people in 2016, so... If EVERYONE paid full price which they did not, their ticket gross was just over $30 million dollars. That means between the settlement and the ride cost, they have lost almost a full season's operating cost.

Then, the impact of something like this comes up. Type Schlitterbahn into the Google search bar and "death" comes up immediately, and it will stay there for a long time. That will cause people to not come to the park, as well as the news of the accident, which will cause them to lose significantly more money.

This was a dumb dumb dumb move, and they will probably go out of business because of it, or get really darn close.

And they should. It was clearly preventable. I talked with one of my friends who is still in themed entertainment when it came out and said it was dangerous as hell and shouldn't be open, and it was a matter of time. Sadly, I was right. They thought they knew better.

It will destroy their business.

They had their insurance company come and look at it though. They didn't see anything wrong with it. Probably because they only insured like ten waterparks at most, so no one is that familiar with the rides. In what I was in, in some locations we were the only group with the rides in the state. In one, the inspector - who usually inspected farms - would come and ask us to run the rides and then ask if they were running right. We would say yes, and we were "certified" or whatever the term in that state was as safe. That's it.

But, when there are like 30 rides in the state, you don't assign a guy that you're paying full time to sit there and actually learn about them because that is an insane cost, so people don't actually learn what they are doing. The feds or state shutting something down would have no real knowledge of what they are doing until it's too late.

On the flip side, the parks know, and shut stuff down quickly.

Before I was in management, I was a coaster operator, and the "lead" (or manager) for that ride. Every morning, maintenance would spend more than an hour checking the coaster I worked on, checking each mechanical part and walking the track. They would then sign off on it and sign it to me.

When I would come in, I would also walk the entire track looking for any issues, we would run the ride doing all safety checks, and then I would have to ride each train to see if the ride "felt" right. After all of this, I would sign it off and we would open to the public.

One day, everything came up normal but when I rode it, it felt a little weird. Maintenance came and checked the ride and found no problems. The feeling that was different - something I could only explain but was not something you could see on the ride or on it's computers - could not be replicated... but they refused to sign it off for another two hours while we experimented to make sure. After it was signed off, I was under strict rules to ride it at least every 30 minutes and IMMEDIATELY shut it down if I felt anything different or if anything was different at all.

That was for a slight problem that was not repeatable, with no federal oversight. We did not screw around.

And that is how it should be. During my time in management, another park had an accident on a similar ride to one of ours. The media coverage of that ride's accident - which was not fatal and was not something that could be explained easily - led to a nearly 20% drop in attendance chain wide.

You do NOT mess with safety in the themed entertainment industry. This doesn't even get into the offseason maintenance like fully taking apart rides and x-raying the whole train piece by piece too...

Having said that, two things:

1) Waterslides are a different beast. They are NOT attached to the slide itself like a roller coaster is. This, as well as the lack of ability to be locked down onto the slide, means that they are inherently more dangerous than theme parks. That isn't to say they are dangerous, but if you see a slide doing something that doesn't seem like it should be possible, you shouldn't do it. Verruckt would have been fine if it wasn't for that stupid hill they added to it and the mesh above the hill. If it was a straight drop, straight away that slowed you down, it probably would be fine and this wouldn't have happened. And never go on a slide that is made by the park.

2) Traveling carnivals are also a different beast. For me, with my ride being shut down above, I still got paid, as did maintenance and everyone else. If I am a carny bringing my ride with me, if it is shut down I'm not getting paid. Additionally, by their nature, when there are carnival accidents, the location the carnival was gets named on TV, not the carnival company usually, making it very difficult to actually track which ones have had major issues. The operators are not attentive, and it simply isn't a thing I trust.

...

So yeah. The people running this park were absolutely morons who deserve everything they are going to get. If the park survives, it will be a drastically, drastically different place in the future. And it should be.

I know I made a huge block of text above that most people won't read, but... I guess here's another with new stats...

No. There isn't government oversight because if you are in this business, business friendly = safe. There is not a world where people flying off a slide and dying makes more people come to their park, or where there is any benefit to a slide that may kill people.

The park should be responsible for checking the designers credentials. In this case, the person who was running the park thought they knew better and decided to do something on their own. No one in the company had the nerve to stop them at any point and say it was stupid. The lawsuit is $20mil+ paid out, the ride was bought and will be taken out and trashed, and I guarantee their attendance dropped last year by at least 20% and will be the same or worse this year.

For a park that brought in 560,000 people at $55 for their max priced ticket in 2016. If we assume they had discounts and season passes and whatnot, a revenue base of $20 million for the year is reasonable. So they lost all that revenue for a year and more.

Water parks are *extremely* labor intensive ventures too. It's not like that is mostly profit. Additionally, they don't sell tons of stuff inside. The whole swim suits don't easily allow you to carry a wallet thing is tough. So, I guarantee that is a huge cut into their proceeds.

If attendance drops 20% per year (which if I were them, that would be a great scenario), that is a decrease in revenue (using the $20 mil estimate) of $4 million per year. And, that decrease probably sticks around for more like 5 years than 2.

Add this all up, and they are losing minimally $20 million (settlement) + $8 million (attendance decrease 2017 / 18) + $2 million (estimate to make the ride) = $30 million dollars.

There is NO scenario where a single ride would ever make up a $30 million revenue shortfall in one year in a park that only makes $30 million a year.

The risk / reward of building a dangerous ride like this is absurd. The head guy decided he needed it to get on the news and get publicity. He thought he could make it safe. And he could have with better design or a more boring ride, but he decided not to.

In the parks I worked for, we had checks and balances, and you would have been demoted or fired for even suggesting such a stupid thing. Apparently they had no checks on him, and now the company will pay the price that is much higher than keeping people safe to begin with.

And, to be clear, it sucks that what happened did, but no federal or state guy who checks on farm equipment all day or who inspects factories for worker safety would have known how to design that slide either. The guy who runs that park would have been in regular contact with people who could have, all of whom I'm positive told him he was insane and they refused. Hell, even their insurance guy thought it was fine.

Yeah, the park has clearly profited a ton by this accident and has absolutely no incentive to self regulate because when you hear about an accident, everyone just wants to go ride, right?

How much money do you think they make? Did you read my post explaining the money? That's a wiping out of profits for five years minimally. That's a HUGE risk.

I can't give too many details, but I know of a non-fatal accident that we traced as a nine-figure problem for the parks I worked for due to lingering attendance drop. It completely, completely changed how we could operate for years. And in the case I'm thinking of, there was absolutely no way it could have been prevented that we figured out - just a straight up one in a billion freak accident, but you can't convince the general public that.

We didn't mess with safety before that point at all, and that just highlighted why.

Right, and they paid a severe financial price for it, as they should have.

The OSHA inspections in California do nothing at those parks. If Disney is half assing their safety inspections, there is not an OSHA person there over their shoulder when they are stopping them.

The only real thing the California differences do is make it so that rides have additional safety structures for emergency evacs. I've never heard of a fatal accident happening during an evac.

As for your point that management didn't have an external voice, Schlitterbahn is one of the few places I know of that isn't self insured. Their insurance agent inspected it and found nothing wrong with it. He would have been as much of an expert if not more than anyone in the state.

Maybe, maybe not.

You mentioned before most coaster manufacturers are a small group that do this all the time and know what they are doing.

In one case, we got a ride from one of them that did not work right and had major design flaws, flaws which although the ride was permitted made us uncomfortable to open it.

This was a ride that was not in a state with "lax regulations." They had no idea. We did. The ride was sent back to the company for a major redesign before we were willing to open it. It caused us significant losses and resulted in lawsuits against us.

Some designers are much better with that stuff than others.

Well, sure. But from what I can tell, there are a total of five water parks in the whole state of Kansas. To actually know what you're doing and looking for, you need a lot of experience looking at this stuff, not just a single day shoe up and look around thing but how do you justify that expertise for five parks? How does one teach that expertise to those people?

It's a highly complex thing to actually implement in government. The maintenance guys working at the parks every day should know exactly what they are looking for and the parks should care to shut stuff down if there is an issue due to the massive hit to their bottom line if there is.

Build? Or fix?

We fixed multiple major issues with rides to make them better than original.

People on our maintenance team were sent to manufacturers to work with them directly to figure out how to best make a ride that would be both safe and functional. They were not engineers, but did consult with them.

We would have had multiple stopping points to stop it from happening though. In this case it sounds like they gave one or two morons full power to do whatever they wanted. And the park is going to lost tens of millions of dollars for it, and they will go to jail.

You can't stop stupid. Even if your ride is totally safe, if you are stupid you can negate that. You need a system that doesn't allow that. Apparently, Schlitterbahn didn't have that.

The system didn't work, but unless we're talking about adding a government regulator to it that isn't on site daily double checking their work, it won't change.

And you'd need a lot of those people to check each ride daily.

And then you'd need to ensure that all of them are checking everything correctly every day.

The cost for that is crazy, and while one death is too many, serious question because I can't find an answer, when was there another water slide death? At the end of the day, considering that as you even mentioned, going on rides is safer than driving to the park, is this the thing that we really should be cracking down on for regulation?

It didn't read as sarcasm. My while point is the free market eliminates parks that delude themselves about safety, usually far earlier than something like this, and unless there is massive, crazy, government oversight to double check everything constantly, a couple morons will sometimes slip between the cracks unfortunately.

For the amount of accidents and the amount of oversight that would be needed to improve them, as well as the rarity of what there is already, we could put regulations in a lot of better spots instead where limited monitoring can actually help, and where the company has their best interests in not caring about the hurt their actions may cause.

It seems like that now, but the ride ran safe more often than not. That isn't a defense of it, but it was there for two years.

The outside insurance inspector was at least if the level or greater than a government official and had more of a reason to carefully inspect the ride as they were (are) on the hook if it wasn't safe.

They apparently tricked both him and all the media until the accident occurred. They could have tricked a government official that does this part time just as easily.

The problem is it is nearly impossible to make these regulations so they make sense.

A regulation that says that a slide that is at least XXXX feet tall shouldn't have a rise in it wouldn't be fair. Look up Master Blaster rides and you can see rides that absolutely safely can zip rafts up the next hill.

A regulation that says that you can't make a slide at least XXXX feet tall doesn't make sense. Blizzard Beach's Summit Plummet ride has been open for 20+ years with people traveling at 50+ miles on just their body with no issues.

Verruckt was only four feet taller than a ride in Brazil that has been open since 2002 with no issues.

Apparently, one of these guys was the owner of the chain, so no one in the chain could have stopped him from being an idiot. But his insurance in that case should have told him no. They also didn't. The ride had to be permitted to be built. It was.

It sucks. I don't think anyone could have stopped him. And honestly, unlike some mistakes that I think are stupid but understandable (mostly with poor harness design on coasters), this one was preventable by an expert.

Like the CEO of a company whose job should be safety.

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I'm quite aware of all of this.

The safety issues in non guest areas are an OSHA thing, and you're not quite right on it. The OSHA issues were given to Disney who *voluntarily shut down the rides to review them and update them* in most of those cases. OSHA did not order it. This is true for the Space Mountain issue you noted. Disney also shut down Matterhorn and Soarin' at the same time without being asked, which OSHA confirmed, to update them. The Matterhorn reopened quickly, the other two remained shut longer while they implemented some changes.

Changes to employee areas that did not affect the guests. Shutting down that much ride capacity at once meant that Disney felt the reports found things they needed to address, even if OSHA didn't tell them too.

Regardless, OSHA is for workers, not for riders. The park I worked for was inspected by OSHA multiple times and we had to make similar changes too, and we weren't in Cali. While those changes are good - and something that a specialist can see differently - those are not things that would have an impact on guest safety. In fact, you can look up Disney World and find OSHA violations too.

Let's take one, Primeval Whirl. There was a fatality on it by an employee in 2007 and OSHA found safety violations that could have helped. They were fined, but the ride reopened. Four years later, another employee working on the same ride sustained injuries from it and died. OSHA would have been all over that ride four years earlier, yet it still didn't prevent the death.

In both cases however, the deaths were from maintenance workers, and not guests. Not that that is okay either, but it doesn't make riding the ride unsafe, nor does OSHA address that part of it for the employees.

The other rides you have mentioned, OSHA's rumored involvement with Splash has to do with them not maintaining effects because OSHA states that it isn't safe to do so any more, not anything to do with the ride elements. The Jungle Cruise thing is about loading and unloading and a new system for it, but unless I missed something wasn't an OSHA requirement, and is quite frankly a better way to load and unload the boats anyway. The Alice attraction had to do with worker safety again for maintenance.

None of this would prevent a bolt failing on Big Thunder or Space Mountain and a train derailment. Just like the OSHA stuff on PWhirl didn't stop it from happening a second time. (And for the record, maintenance is much harder to keep safe because you aren't in a contained area on the ride itself... Far more to go wrong. Not acceptable for injuries, but much harder to know how to deal with every situation beforehand.)

Trust me, I know VERY much about the California stuff. I still have multiple friends in parks out there who I speak with regularly.

I think they did believe that they were operating a ride and maintaining a ride that was safe. Again, the financial damage that this is going to cause the company will be crippling. I don't think they thought it was going to be so difficult to pull off.

Having said that, they stated they built it themselves after everyone else turned it down. My bet is everyone else told them the airtime hill made it impossible to work, and they thought they knew better. I tended to work more on the dry park side although I did work with some waterparks, but I could have (and did in phone calls with friends about it) identify a number of issues regarding it that any operator worth their salt would have seen. That netting was the stupidest thing in particular.

I don't foresee a way they *aren't* guilty on this one, regardless of how they deflect.

Although I haven't gone through everything they have done, the Master Blaster I know is made by an outside company (WhiteWater, if I recall correctly). They probably shopped the idea with some manufacturers or just one that they trusted who then decided to go forward with creating it after they went through a ton of computer simulations.

Depending on how parks want to take design credit for things, they can sort of just do that:

- Disney takes design credit for nearly everything with the Imagineers. In most cases, their ride systems are completely built by outside companies but fully credited to the Imagineers. Once in a while, word about the underlying tech creators gets out (like how they use Vekoma for most of their coaster projects), but a lot of design and components that aren't Disney they take credit for.

- Parks often give designers "specs" for what they want and expect to see projects that fit within that spec. The park determines what ride type it is, ride height, and often request certain elements or certain things. There are basically two things a park can do, either say to the vendor that they want something just like (whatever successful ride the vendor most recently had) and let them go at it, which gives an expected level of success and return, or they can request something new or multiple things new, which requires the vendors to go out and try to do whatever. Sometimes it works (the first Batman: The Ride). Sometimes it doesn't and the ride is terrible (Son of Beast). Sometimes, the vendor has huge issues delivering what they promised (X). Often it is somewhat in between (Top Thrill Dragster).

The point is, parks can decide what makes sense for them to claim. In the case of Schlitterbahn, these guys were almost definitely giving ideas to companies who would make them into something exciting that would work. They then shopped this insane idea around to their vendors, all of whom declined to do it - probably because doing an airtime hill on a ride that you haven't physically tied down the vehicle is absolutely stupid - and they decided they knew better so they would do it themselves.

I do think these guys were deluded into the idea that they knew better than everyone else and since all their other stuff didn't stink, this had to be amazing too. I'm sure they thought that it was safe. But the design of it absolutely negates every other claim about them being "designers", because if they were, this one was obvious.