This post discusses the serious topic of theme park ride safety with real-world scenarios. Some content may be disturbing for readers.
You have a 1 in 775,000 chance of being struck by lightning. Scary, isn’t it.
Well, not really. Most rational people don’t have a lingering or constant fear of being struck by lightning because the odds are so incredibly small, it’s nearly incomprehensible.
And yet, many of us are starting to fear amusement rides. It seems like every other week we’re being exposed to amusement ride accidents happening around the world and the media is going wild questioning as to whether any amusement ride is safe. But you’re 50 times more likely to be struck by lightning.
So how safe are rides, what is in place to protect us and should we be worried when we visit a theme park?
How safe are rides?
In 2017, the top ten theme park groups in the world including Disney, Universal and Merlin Entertainment saw over 475,000,000 people through their gates. Of these guests, there were 1,171 reported amusement ride accidents in the US and Canada. With only 10% of these being considered serious, meaning they required hospitalization within 24 hours of the accident occurring, that equates to a 1 in 39 million chance that if you visit a theme park you’ll be involved in a serious accident.
According to the National Sporting Goods Association, the injury rates for golf, billiards, fishing, and camping are higher than amusement rides. In 2013, there were 912 injuries per million people who were roller skating and 799 injuries per million people who played basketball.
With a 1 in 130,000 chance of being in a stair or step related accident, you’re statistically more likely to have a fatal accident walking down Main Street USA than on any of the rides at Disneyland. Even worse, with a 1 in 44,000 chance of being involved in a pedestrian-vehicle fatality, you’re actually much more likely to have a fatal accident in the car park before you even step foot in the park.
But that’s if you even get there. You have a 1 in 8,096 chance of being involved in a fatal car accident this year. Statistically, there’s almost no comparison and the drive to the Theme Park is in theory 4800 times more dangerous than anything you’ll experience in the Theme Park itself.
What is in place to stop accidents?
So we know the statistics, but how are theme park rides safe? Theme park attractions are predominantly dangerous. They’re heavy machines with twisted metal, immensely strong motors and hydraulics involving speed, intense forces and immense moving parts and it’s for this reason that they have to be designed in the safest possible manner.
Design
For mechanisms, let’s start with Roller Coasters, one of the most complex attractions in the industry. Before anybody can even ride a coaster, they need to be designed with an understanding of physics and human limitations to avoid uncomfortable or even fatal physical forces. When a roller coaster moves around the track it generates G-Forces based off it’s speed and direction. Positive vertical G forces are those that push you into the seat and the human body can safely withstand 4-6 G’s positively, and between 1.5 – 2 G’s negatively (the sort which pushes you out of your seat) without any negative health effects.
You’ll also notice that when a roller coaster goes around a curve, the track rotates in such a way that instead of riders being pushed to the side, you’re actually being pushed downwards. This is called banking and is vital in preventing lateral or horizontal G-forces, as the human neck can usually only sustain 1.8 G’s horizontally. This is also why rides without banking, such as wild mouse coasters, often either slowly traverse around bends or compensate with tilting vehicles.
Block Sections
Have you ever noticed that many roller coasters which use more than one train have either one or several sections around the track which are completely flat, have brakes and often stairs leading off them? This is a block brake run and is the start of a new ‘block section’. Roller coasters are divided into block sections and are controlled by the ride system so that only one train can be in each block at one time. This almost entirely negates the risk of a collision and allows the ride system to completely stop the attraction within a reasonable amount in a predictable manner.
Water Rides
Though when an attraction can’t stop in a predictable manner is an entirely different scenario and presents us with the most dangerous attractions in the theme park industry: water slides and rides. Water is a cheap and effective way of moving a boat through an attraction with relative ease. However, if a guest was to fall out of a boat into the flow of the attraction it’s very difficult to quickly and safely stop the flow of the water and get the guest out of harm’s way. It also provides another danger in the form of drowning as it can’t be assumed that all guests know how to swim.
As water slides also rely on the guest being the vehicle for the experience, water parks require guest compliance to maintain a safe experience. But it’s near impossible to prevent erratic behaviour that puts the guest into a dangerous scenario if they so choose to.
Thankfully many engineers are working behind the scenes to consistently predict possible dangers involved with attractions and aim to prevent them from happening in the first place, even those that are statistically unlikely. Even in the event of a failure, theme park attractions have safety measures in place to make sure that the guest and the attraction are out of harm’s way.
Fail Safes
Fail-safes are vital to the safety of amusement park attractions. A fail-safe is a design feature in which during the event of a specific failure, it inherently responds in a way that will cause no or minimal harm to other equipment, the environment or to people. An example of this is on many Intamin Drop Towers around the world. We’ve all worried about the possibility of the brakes not working on these rides, sending you straight into the ground at terminal velocity. Thankfully, this is impossible, as the ride uses rare-earth magnets to brake the gondola and they’re expected to continue working for hundreds of thousands of years.
Harness Design
How about harnesses though? What if I’m on an attraction and it loses power and suddenly all the harnesses fly up throwing everybody to their demise? Thankfully, in most modern attractions, that is extremely unlikely. Harnesses are almost universally designed to be in a normally-closed state meaning that it uses power to open them, and releases that power to close them. But these have physical limitations, which is why it’s vital that guests pay attention to the safety signs around the attraction specifying those people that can’t and shouldn’t ride the attraction. The height requirement is not because theme parks think that your child isn’t mature enough for the ride, it’s because the harness can only compensate for so many body types and cheating these system can put people into serious, sometimes fatal danger. Ride signage is there for your safety.
Back to harnesses, Hydraulic-based harnesses use multiple hydraulic fluid chambers in each seat with sensors attached that regularly feeds information into a computer system which monitors the status of the attraction.
PLCs
These are called PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) and they run most elements such as the brakes, lift hills and switch tracks. PLCs can determine where roller coasters trains are, how fast they are travelling, whether there are any potential hazards or faults, and make decisions accordingly.
For example; If a vehicle is moving too fast through the track, an operator may not be able to notice this. Therefore, the computer can send a signal to one of the block brake sections to slow it down without needing to bring it to the attention of the operator.
But PLCs cannot ‘see’ in the same way which we can and rely almost entirely upon sensors to control the attraction. This is why refurbishments are vital to upholding the safety of attractions as sensors need to be regularly updated, replaced and maintained to provide the safest possible experience. PLCs are also designed so that if a sensor presents any strange information or a variable it doesn’t understand then it will bring the attraction to a halt as a fail-safe, alert the operator, who can then inform an engineer.
Why might I still find rides scary?
Even with all of these mechanisms and planning, why do we still feel unsafe? This is actually intentional and is vital to the ride experience. Amusement park rides tightrope the fine line of being safe and dangerous at the same time and many guests understand this in varying degrees.
This is called cognitive dissonance, a discomfort from having two or more contradictory thoughts and is vital in making thrill rides ‘thrilling’. You want your riders to believe that they’re in danger whilst also providing comfort in the ride vehicle, restraints and mechanisms to not induce a full panic.
But what about when a ride stops leaving guests suspended in the air or trapped on a coaster? News outlets will often make a big deal about it and it seems incredibly scary, but this safe maneuver on a roller coaster is actually part of its safety protocols. Being able to stop people in a predictable manner allows easy evacuations and perhaps any further dangers if there has been an issue along the ride path. For many guests, it’s nothing more than an inconvenience and they are never in any real sort of danger.
Why do accidents still happen?
With all of these measures in place; why do accidents still happen? Unfortunately, attractions do not exist within a bubble. Even though there are people whose job it is to predict and prevent these events from occurring, there are often multiple variables that can’t be accounted for which have the potential to cause an accident.
Sadly, one of the biggest variables is money. After many accidents, it’s not uncommon to find that one of my major influences behind the event was cost. Theme park attractions are expensive to run and maintain and theme parks often don’t make a large profit. It’s not unheard of for some management teams to have poor judgement and cut corners to increase profits but this creates small issues which isolated aren’t a problem, but these can collect in an unfortunate and unpredictable way to create much larger issues.
People are also capable of putting themselves into their own danger. Whether it’s the illusion that nothing bad can happen in a theme park, willful ignorance or again – poor judgement; sometimes people just test the limits. At Cedar Point, in 2015 a man was killed after being badly hit by a moving roller coaster train whilst looking for his phone and wallet after they fell out when riding the roller coaster. The man’s family said this was very out of character and in these events, it’s hard to predict who was at fault but roller coasters don’t just fall from the sky… often.