As parks get bigger and rides push the envelopes more, it will get worse. Does that spell a certain doom?
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RollerCoasters aren't my whole life... they just make my life whole
Trekker Park said:6. The public perception is that amusement parks are all fabulously wealthy. Everybody knows how much money these rides cost, and these places have dozens of them. Everybody knows how many people come to parks, and how much admissions cost. The places must be rich. As one executive told me not long ago, "Lawyers go where the deepest pockets are. They sue us because they think we have the money and we'll settle out of court rather than spend the money to fight."
It isn't just a perception. With many park chains now owned by behemoth entertainment companies (Warner Bros., Paramount, Disney), there is a hell of a deep pocket just waiting for someone killed/injured at these properties. These things follow a predictable pattern:
1. Person gets hurt/killed on ride.
2. Media reports 24/7 on it for a few days.
3. Person or beneficiarie$ gets an attorney after all their friends tell them to do so.
4. Attorney files case, including video/print media snippets.
5. Park realizes ignorant jury will be mesmerized by TV clips and biased by sympathy towards the injured party.
6. Park opens REALLY BIG CHECKBOOK and writes a REALLY BIG CHECK.
7. (Kentucky only) Beneficiarie$ buy their own liquor store.
I am also in fear of what litigation madness and media frenzy will be inflicting on my past time. Especially since I live in California, home of more free-swimming lawyers and ACTION NEWS! teams than just about anywhere else. I hope it will eventually come to the point where the Bar self-enforces some sort of sane control on litigation, but all the people on the Bar made thousands/millions as lawyers already and don't want to kill it for the new crop. I think that lawyers will do a lot more damage to our economy before they are reined in.
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Mike Miller - Q. How many lawyers would we have to kill to save America? A. I don't know, let's find out!
Wood - anything else is an imitation
The amusement industry has placed an extreme emphasis on rider safety essentially forever. If you look at John Miller's early work, the point behind most of his inventions was to improve roller coaster safety. The reason is simple: Injuries are bad for business.
It wasn't until about 30 years ago that ride safety became its own discipline, largely through the efforts of people in the industry...to drop names, I'll specifically name Red Wood, Walker LeRoy, and Richard Coulter, but they are far from the first or only pioneers in professionalizing ride safety. But the lack of safety inspectors, Government oversight, established industry standards, or government regulations did not mean the industry was unsafe. Again, injuries are bad for business, so through design, engineering, maintenance and operation, the industry did what it could to insure safe rides, and did a pretty good job of it.
A few things have changed, though. First and most critically, the clientele has changed. More people than ever are riding rides, and the population is apparently stupider than ever, and at the same time, less tolerant of imperfection. It used to be that if something went wrong on a ride and the rider got off without injury...well, no harm, no foul. The canonical joke at one of the safety seminars I attended was that if a rider got thrown from the ride, the operator should chase him down and collect an extra ticket for the additional thrill. Trouble is, people don't think that way anymore.
Partly as a response to this change in attitude, partly because it is simply good practice, we now have industry standards...more standards than you can shake a stick at when you combine DIN, TÜV and ASTM standards. Government has decided this is an industry it should regulate, and again, the practice of ride safety has evolved from part of the role of the operations and maintenance team to a separate profession. Now risk management and loss prevention have a special place in the industry...but it isn't really a change. Because the bottom line is the same: When you hurt people, it is bad for business.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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