Ed Markey grandstands following Epcot death

Screw Ed Markey. He's a democrat from Massachusetts: how much should he be listened to or trusted? Thankfully, not very many people have listened to him, although he has been trying this Nader-inspired approach for years.

Where does responsibility lie? We are taught to take "personal" responsibility for our actions. Who holds cooperations for their's? This is not a one sided issue of regulation. It's about a social contract and social responsibility. I think it's resonable to ride an Amusement Park ride that it will be safe, not cause injury or death. Manfuctures of rides ,in my veiw, should build full scale rides and put through series of test before shipping them to parks as prototypes with a few weeks of testing and open it up and pray for the best. The death caused by Knott's perlious Plunge should have prevented the death of a person on a cloned ride in Europe's Oakwood park. Oakwood and Intamin should have changed the restraint system on their version immediately after finding out the result of death on Knott's Perlious Plunge. Almost a year later Oakwood or Intamin did't or wouldn't change the restraint on the Oakwood version and it caused a death of a rider. Top thrill Dragster caused injury to riders when shards of steel flew up and hit riders. The same thing happened on Kinda Ka without riders Thank God. My point is you have the fox watching over the hen house. There should be some criteria that should fullfill the social responsibility of companies. If regulation didn't occur, we would be driving car without seat belts. Many companies look at risk management those companies would rather pay settlements because it cheeper than trying to prevent harm with added cost of safety. Rather than preventitve causionary measures companies choose to react when an accident occurs. If an accident occurs at a Disney Park the first step in their protocal is to get the injured victim off the property as soon as possible (some times air lifting) not only to help a victim but, to be able to make the claim that the person didn't die on their property. Many companies have many ways of doing things. Some of them are interested in profits over people's saftey.
*** This post was edited by Cedar "Counter" Point 6/21/2005 1:19:46 PM ***

The current series of articles/news/message board threads are about a 4-year-old that died on a ride. To date, nobody has determined the cause of death. I see no need to start talking about social responsibility until we know if the park did anything wrong. We have a judicial system in place to remedy gross abuses if this has happened.

Accidents happen in all aspects of life. If you expect a zero accident rate for anything (which is impossible) you will drive the cost of implementation so high that companies would go out of business. In “Atlantis” there would never be accidents. In the real world guys get struck by lightning in the parking lot of Cedar Point. Big Brother cannot and never has been able to prevent all accidents.

What we need to do is determine if amusement rides are relatively safe or unsafe compared to other acceptable activities such as walking, bike riding, scuba diving, etc. There is an inherent risk in living. The question is whether roller coaster ride significantly alters that risk factor.

I think that if we put this in perspective there is a good chance the amusement rides are one of the safer activities that anybody could participate in this side of staying home. However, I could be wrong. There is no data to say one-way or the other. Until we get the data, I see no reason to sensationalize and start implementing costly solutions that probably will do nothing to change the accident risk factor.