Amusement Park Sfaety
There's an interesting article in this month's P.E. Magazine about amusement park safety.
Hopefully this link works:
www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine
The article talks about the qualifications (none) the people behind the Schlitterbahn water slide.
The article describes the design as "crude trial and error".
Its also interesting the variation in design/safety standards,state to state,
I have trouble taking a trade journal article seriously when they can't correctly abbreviate the name of another organization that they're referring to multiple times. It's IAAPA, no IIAPA.
Vater said:
The link just takes me to the home page. Is this the article?
Yes,I was having trouble getting the article to link.
bigboy said:
I have trouble taking a trade journal article seriously when they can't correctly abbreviate the name of another organization that they're referring to multiple times. It's IAAPA, no IIAPA.
So are you are you saying that the fact that a proof reader missed an abbreviation,that discredits the substance of the entire article ?
Glad you weren't one of my professors in grad school.
I did an Environmental Engineering thesis (pre - spellcheck) where I misspelled "environmental" .
My professor pointed it out,but he still graded it on substance .
Regardless, it really isn't that interesting of an article. It's a trade journal article in a professional engineer publication pitching that more PE's need to get involved in the amusement industry. It's a pitch to their membership; far from a compelling article that brings any substance to the table.
There's a difference between a mistake in a thesis and in a professional journal article. And I'm not sure it's a proof-reading error when it happens more than once.
That was far from the only problem I had with the article, but it stuck out at the beginning. Like most articles on amusement safety, it flashes scary sounding number (22 fatalities! 29000 injuries!) with no context concerning the number of total rides it takes to get to those numbers or the nature of the injuries. Annual inspections are all well and good, but they only see the rides in a tiny fraction of their operating time. It's the daily, weekly, and monthly inspections that are important and the overwhelming majority are already performing and documenting them with the FAA-like efficiency that the article mentions. Because, you know, it's kind of in their best interest, financial and otherwise, to be safe.
I would agree with the assertion that state regulation programs should be staffed by more qualified individuals. Example, the program in Texas, while it seems to be well grounded in the ASTM standards, is run through the department of insurance and much of the inspection responsibility is handled through insurance carriers.
You must be logged in to post
