Man dies on Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia

LostKause:

This accident has kind of freaked me out about riding coasters, for now. I would feel a hundred times safer with a seat belt at this point.

I think adding seatbelts is probably more of a psychological fix than a functional mechanical one. Seatbelts are probably millions of times more likely to experience a failure than the mechanical locking mechanism on the lap bar, and probably provide little to no real protection if the lap bar were to fail. That said, I don't think anyone should be shocked to see seatbelts get added all over the place if only to address the phycological fallout of this incident.

I've never had a problem with KI using seatbelts. Their ops prove you can still dispatch quickly while using them, and it's easy enough to adjust/position the buckle before the restraint is pulled to keep it off your legs. Adding belts to parks that aren't used to them will certainly slow them down for a while but if the trade-off is fewer dead riders, so be it.

One other thing, how many riders (after hearing about this incident) are going to refuse to ride similar rides without belts? People want to feel safe on the rides, most folks I see are pulling the restraints as tight as possible, opposite of coaster fans who try to leave airtime gaps (echoing Chris comment I hadn't seen before posting).

Parker R:

Most likely this will be the ending of this ride as a whole.

Probably not. The cause is typically identified, corrective actions are made, and the ride eventually reopens.

Those seatbelts are pretty gnarly, if they are positioned correctly I think there is a pretty good chance you stay in if the restraint failed. I don't have the numbers .... but for a minor inconvenience, I think it's probably worth it.

My local park has classic wooden coasters that 30 years ago didn't have any restraints at all, now they have ratcheting lap bars and seatbelts.

It’s interesting that I see Goliath at Magic Mountain being on the list of being temporarily closed. Completely different manufacturer and train restraints. I’m assuming maybe it’s the name association?

I think that's a solid assumption.

I won't complain about adding seatbelts if, for every coaster that has one added, they take them off a coaster that clearly doesn't need them. I'm looking at you, Beast.

I know these coasters have given a billion safe rides, but Clamshells always did scare me a little. Don’t the RMC coasters all have seat belts? Slightly more wild track designs than B&M, but they feel safer than clamshells.

Gunkey Monkey:

It’s interesting that I see Goliath at Magic Mountain being on the list of being temporarily closed. Completely different manufacturer and train restraints. I’m assuming maybe it’s the name association?

If that's the case I would think they would have closed the Batman clone Fiesta Texas as well. It's been so long, are the Giovanola hyper restraints similar enough to the B&M clamshells? Or are they completely different?

The name was changed to Chupacabra a couple of years ago.

The victim has been identified.

https://www.11alive.com/art...7f125f1f47

From what I saw people posting, they found he was a recently joined member of a couple of the enthusiast Facebook groups, as well.

Not to speculate further, but as a former CF op, if the ops team had issues with a seat locking before dispatch, CF policy was to shut that row down immediately. This was especially true on Mantis, since stand-up coasters require two things to lock.

That said, the implementation of CF safety procedures has been noticeable so far across the legacy SF parks. Some parks even seem to have better maintenance than before, with Dorney being the most notable example in my experience.

Great Adventure, on the other hand, took longer than it should have to address what appeared to be legacy SF maintenance backlogs. Whatever delayed Batman, coupled with El Toro still running one train, especially now that we're in October.

It's been a long old time since I operated a B&M ride and it was only two of their rides so I can't comment on the specifics of Goliath, but my memory of the restraint monitoring system is that it would tell you that it was far enough down, but that would only infer that it was locked.

I.e. if you hadn't set the restraints to 'lock' and you pulled the restraint down far enough it would be unlocked but would show green. It was a proxy sensor, rather than a system that checked that someone was locked in - that was down to the crew to check the light was on, whilst also ensuring the restraint was physically locked by pulling it up.

LostKause:

I do. The life of one person and the mental health of everyone else involved with just this one accident is worth everyone else taking an extra few seconds to put on a seat belt. It adds one more layer of protection.

The problem is what those few seconds do to overall capacity.

On Goliath, it probably doesn't matter a great deal because the ride only has two trains, leaving plenty of time for the turnaround without stacking. But on three-train B&Ms like Silver Star at Europa-Park, operators are working with dispatch intervals of around 60 seconds, within which they have to unload, load, and check restraints. Add seatbelts to that process and even a relatively small delay can have a significant impact on capacity.

If you go from 60 dispatches an hour to 45, for example, that's a 25% reduction in throughput. On a ride carrying 36 passengers per train, that's 540 fewer people per hour, or more than 5,000 fewer over a ten-hour operating day. And those people don't simply disappear. They spend longer in the queue, meaning the cost of those supposedly insignificant extra seconds is ultimately borne by thousands of guests.

Of course, if seatbelts provide a meaningful safety benefit, that may well justify the tradeoff. But dismissing their operational impact as "just a few seconds" overlooks how those seconds compound across an entire operating day.

And when you're talking about a restraint design with more than 25 years of service and hundreds of millions of riders carried safely, I think it's reasonable to ask how much additional protection a seatbelt would actually provide. That doesn't mean the existing system is infallible, but it does mean we have an enormous amount of real-world evidence of its reliability.

The question isn't whether seatbelts might make the ride safer in theory. It's whether the additional safety benefit is substantial enough to justify the very real costs of implementing them.

The problem is what those few seconds do to overall capacity.

No, I understand that completely, because I can do math. And I don't care. But checking belts + restraints vs. just restraints is not going to cut capacity by 25%. Again, because I can do math. An extra e.g. 45 seconds doesn't do that unless you are dispatching trains every 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

And you're not.

I did say that it probably wouldn't matter a whole lot on Goliath.

Seriously, griping about seatbelts destroying capacity, when that very thing could have been life saving to this guy is pretty bold.

Shall we just call you Lord Farquaad from now on?

Raven-Phile:

Seriously, griping about seatbelts destroying capacity, when that very thing could have been life saving to this guy is pretty bold.

Safety engineering is about understanding risks, evaluating how effectively different measures mitigate them, and considering their practical implications.

Personally, I'd rather see recommendations based on a thorough understanding of what actually went wrong, including whether additional restraints could have prevented it, rather than assuming seatbelts are necessarily the right solution.

I suspect the decision may ultimately be taken out of the parks' hands regardless.

I've seen thoughts and concern for the victims and the witnesses. Let me add my thoughts and concerns for the ride operators who are likely young adults. Every time I read about a coaster accident I am taken back to 1990 or 1991 when I was an area manager on the Big Dipper at Geauga Lake. I was sitting in the Park Ops office when a call came over the radio of an accident at the venerable wooden coaster.

I vividly remember racing down the midway to find shocked passengers in a damaged train sitting in the station, then looking up to see a damaged train on the lift hill. A returning train came through the brake run without being stopped, collided with the train in load, sending it hurtling back onto the circuit.

I am instantly taken back to the crying, the shocked faces and bloody noses, and I can still smell the combination of grease and midway smells that hung in the air. I remember running up the lift hill (OSHA regs were loose, if in existence at all) and telling the operator who first responded to climb back down and go to the office for what would be a long night of reporting and giving statements. I remember speaking to young children, teenagers, and adults trying to comfort them while we waited for the first aid personnel to arrive and assist. It was a bad night, and the memory of that night is one I do not like reliving.

Nobody was killed that night. There were some broken bones, cuts, and bruises...but there were no life altering impacts. And still, I have at least a small amount of PTSD from it.

I feel for the young people who will hold themselves responsible for this, whether they really did contribute to the incident or not. It isn't anything a young person just making money on a summer job should have to experience.