Water Slide That Decapitated Boy Violated Basic Design Standards
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> 35. [Designer Jeffrey] HENRY compared the construction of Verrückt to an arms race against rival waterparks.
> 37. HENRY admitted that he was ignoring established industry safety standards because he felt he could redefine those standards with his own achievements. While describing his vision of how Verrückt would change the industry, HENRY explained, "[W]e're going to set the standards up, and set the education up, and we're gonna redefine many of the definables that have been defined in the industry that we couldn't find good reasons for."
Also check out paragraphs 85-89 for some incredibly unethical behavior on the part of one of Schlitterbahn's attorneys.
[1]: https://www.wycocourtks.org/uploads/4/4/1/2/4412070/2018-03-...
A few other horrifying details:
* Riders were restrained by Velcro straps. These frequently came loose. One rider broke several toes after his restraint came undone during a ride, forcing him to dig his feet into the corners of the raft.
* The brake system on the ride was completely nonfunctional when the boy was killed, and had been that way for several weeks. Evidence suggests that the park planned to delay maintenance until the park closed for the season.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Park -- aka "Class Action Park"
I'm still amazed to this day he did it because he's afraid of heights. It was easily 50' high. Fortunately, the only downside was it was like getting an enormous enema.
Those sled things that went down the concrete track, everyone has scars from those. Great memories but not remotely safe.
Great Adventure (Six Flags) wasn't as much fun but we all came back in one piece.
It's gotten considerably better since then though when I stopped going they were in the middle of a serious nickel-and-diming phase.
A ton of fun, you could get going pretty fast and you definitely wanted to have your legs crossed when you hit the pool at the bottom. Never heard of anyone getting hurt though, other than some mild abrasions if you slipped off the mat -- the concrete wasn't totally smooth. The curves were pretty steeply banked and the most you could really do if you went over the side was end up in underbrush.
Terrible that adults who should know better are making rides without apparent regard for safety of the (mostly) kids that will be riding them. Those elevated trough rides do worry me, they really need to be fully enclosed anywhere there is any chance of going airborne or over the edge.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-do-roller-coasters-stay-on-the-tra...
Why? This is a serious question, since I am not that experienced in crazy water slides.
Central Jersey dude here. Yeah I did the Action Park alpine slide. And saw that water slide your dad mentioned (I opted for the smaller one).
But not everybody was so lucky at GA. I was there the day a girl died falling off Lightning Loops. And the family with us also happened to be there previously the day a fire broke out in the Haunted House, killing several people.
In high school I volunteered at the local hospital. One of the patients was the guy who stood up on Scream Machine to impress his girlfriend and fell out.
They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards for cars. There's a great 99% Invisible episode about the shift from believing injury from car accidents was unavoidable/the fault of the driver to making cars safer in impacts:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/
Stories like this seem to be a step backwards. Regulation can sometimes hinder some industry (usually when one industry lobbies for it to keep competitors), but it also has an incredible track record of making things safer.
All of the great services and products we use today came from extreme risk taking, it's the corner stone of entrepreneurship.
> They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards [...]
Maybe it's seen a bit of a resurgence recently, but history (and the attendant selection bias) has always rewarded risk-takers whose risks paid off, while letting the rest die off-screen.
Can someone explain why they are charging the 29 year old director of operations who started as a lifeguard and had no formal training or connection to engineering/design and not one of the designers or owners, both of which are mentioned in the indictment multiple times?
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than they needed to charge someone.
Still not understanding why the criminal indictment isn't for the designer or owner who are mentioned several times...
When a safety feature was out of service, they decided to keep running it. That sounds like a director of operations decison.
And much easier case to prove than design deficiency.
For instance, the involuntary manslaughter charge is going to be hard to proof when the evidence that he was planning on going on the ride the same day is presented. They have to prove recklessness which includes proving the person knew their actions were likely to cause harm.
Also worth noting they are basically throwing the book at him with the number and severity of charges on the indictment.
(IANAL, though. Legal definitions of those words may not match my intuitive understanding of them...)
The legal definition of recklessness requires that the person know (or should know) that the ride is dangerous. Legally, it is more difficult to prove when that person took actions that suggest they did not think it was dangerous.
To your point about broken safety features:
One could potentially even argue that the brake isn't a safety feature. It could be there to help riders that are scared of going too fast to more easily control their speed, simply for their own enjoyment. I don't think that use of the brake would be required under normal operations and therefore, it could be argued that the brake wasn't a safety feature. I personally don't think it makes sense that a "safety" feature is optional and relies on the rider, but I could be wrong. The designers were certainly negligent in other ways....
Not sure if that follows or if it makes any more sense to you, but legally, its a potential argument.
While in general safety features can require a competent user, e.g. the brakes in your car, in the case of amusement park rides that allow children that does indeed not make sense.
But... I would argue that this is just evidence of substandard design of the speed control system. There is ample evidence of a history of injuries due to excessive speed.
[0] https://www.wycocourtks.org/uploads/4/4/1/2/4412070/2018-03-...
Often the safety of something for a particular person depends on their knowledge of the danger. For example there is a board that is failing on my deck. It is possible that it could give way leading to someone twisting their ankle or even breaking a bone. Yet I walk on my deck everyday--because I know to avoid stepping on that board until I get around to learning how to fix it and doing so.
Maybe he knew the places where it was more dangerous than well designed and built similar rides, and what to do or not do at those places to minimize the risk?
Surf instructor sends novice who has never surfed before out to surf Teahupoo. In his defense, the instructor was planning on surfing it the same day.
I'm pretty sure you can get involuntary manslaughter for driving recklessly, crashing your car, and killing your passenger. Or failing to maintain your car properly, crashing it due to an avoidable failure, and killing your passenger.
If I'm correct and you can get inv. manslaughter when you're in the same vehicle as the victim, it shouldn't be too hard to prove when the person was only planning to be in the ride later.
http://fox4kc.com/2018/03/26/schlitterbahn-co-owner-arrested...
Edit: remove amp link
It is interesting that this firm has an "owner" rather than a CEO and a board. It's my impression that executives and board members would be less likely to face criminal charges in this sort of situation.
According to the article:
> As investigators were looking into the death of the boy, Caleb Schwab, in August 2016, Mr. Miles, then the operations director, hid or destroyed documents detailing injuries sustained by riders, the indictment said.
I'd guess that this might have something to do with it. Even if it turns out that no one did anything actually criminal in regards to the building and operation of the ride itself, destroying evidence to impede an investigation is criminal. The criminal charges for this are probably also easier to prove than the ones related to the ride itself.
Furthermore, even if it turns out there was nothing actually criminal in the operation of the ride, so that none of the owners or designers are guilty of anything, he can still go down for destroying evidence.
In short...he's potentially double screwed. So indict him first, point out that even if he gets off on the ride-related charges (which is plausible...he can try to argue that he is not an engineer, so he trusted the judgment of the engineers who designed and built the thing), they've got him on the destroying evidence thing. His only realistic hope, therefore, is to accept a deal. Tell him you really want to nail the owners and designers, and offer him a deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton%27...
> 61. In response to the Groves incident, MILES intercepted the incident reports which the lifeguards had written. MILES destroyed these written witness statements. MILES then forced the lifeguards to write coached statements which omitted any detail of how the injury had occurred. MILES then ordered the medical staff to alter their medical reports.
What?
[1]: He did this by bringing suit out of Kansas and instead in Texas under "choice of law" ...
I read about this here: https://www.injuryrelief.com/blog/how-is-representative-scot... - I assume it's a reputable source.... but could be a load of crap and out of context falsehoods, written by authors who have an interest in raising the cap in Kansas.. but hey, even if they do, the underlying sentiment is still true?..
That looks like an accurate description.
First of all, by the author's own admission, Rep. Schwab has never made any public statements regarding personal injury damages caps, and his only legislative action related to that subject is voting for a 2014 law which raised the damages cap. So claiming to be able to read his mind so as to justify a very nasty attack is quite uncalled for (IMO).
The Kansas Supreme Court upheld the damages cap 5-2 in 2012,[1] 2 years prior to the law raising the cap, so it's a real stretch (you might say a lie) to claim that law was passed "in order to head off the threat of the Kansas Supreme Court invalidating the whole damages cap scheme."
With respect to the concrete point the author raises, he's lying by omission. Economic damages (actual financial losses, no cap in Kansas) and non-economic damages ("pain and suffering," capped at $300k in Kansas) are two of the three types of damages that may be awarded in a civil case.
There are also punitive damages, which under Kansas law[2] are awarded when the jury finds "the defendant acted toward the plaintiff with willful conduct, wanton conduct, fraud or malice." Punitive damages are capped according to the formula
(e) Except as provided
by subsection (f), no
award of exemplary or
punitive damages
pursuant to this section
shall exceed the lesser
of:
(1) The annual
gross income earned by
the defendant, as
determined by the court
based upon the
defendant's highest
gross annual income
earned for any one of
the five years
immediately before the
act for which such
damages are awarded; or
(2) $5 million.
(f) In lieu of the
limitation provided by
subsection (e), if the
court finds that the
profitability of the
defendant's misconduct
exceeds or is expected
to exceed the limitation
of subsection (e), the
limitation on the amount
of exemplary or punitive
damages which the court
may award shall be an
amount equal to 1½ times
the amount of profit
which the defendant
gained or is expected to
gain as a result of the
defendant's misconduct.
Considering that the Schwab family could have brought lawsuits on behalf of multiple injured parties, on multiple grounds, and against multiple defendants, then hypothetically, under Kansas law, my conservative back-of-the-napkin estimate is the defendants might have faced punitive damages totaling over ten billion dollars. (Which is not to say that amount would be awarded, just that Kansas law allows for it).
Additionally, there are several good reasons I can think of, completely unrelated to Kansas statute, for the Schwab family to sue in Texas instead of Kansas.
First of all, and I don't know whether this is the case here, liability disclaimers (as might be printed on amusement part tickets) usually require that lawsuits be brought in the state where the company is headquartered. In that case, it would be faster to simply sue Schlitterbahn in Texas rather than waiting for Kansas courts to rule on the disclaimer's validity.
Second, Rep. Schwab is a well-known and controversial figure in Kansas. Many people (e.g. the author), potentially including jurors or (less likely, but hardly unheard of) judges, may have difficulty assessing the case in an objective and detached manner.
Third, Texas has an unusually difficult process[3] for obtaining discovery from Texas-based parties in an out-of-state lawsuit.
As for the question of the author's preferred policy outcome, I disagree. I agree that it makes sense in terms of incentives and fairness for there to be a high or no cap on economic (for the plaintiff's actual financial loss) and punitive (for clear misconduct by the defendant) damages, at least for this type of case. Non-economic damages are much more nebulous and tend to be awarded based on how sympathetic the jury finds the plaintiff.
The purpose of personal injury law is to punish (and so discourage) negligent behavior, according to the defendant's degree of culpability. It is not to provide financial windfalls to plaintiffs according to how sympathetic they are (which encourages lawsuits). Whether it's a photogenic 10-year-old, Honey Boo-Boo's mom or Charles Manson who dies has no bearing on the question of whether the defendant is culpable and if so to what degree.
Jurisdictions where non-economic damages aren't capped are where you most often get the sort of case where average people lose all their assets and income because a child / veteran / homecoming queen / father-of-five / judge's aunt slips and falls on their driveway. If the law gets in the feelings-based business of deciding whether bad things happened to good people, the inevitable result is injustice. The law's proper domain are the facts-based businesses of redressing objectively-definable wrongs and of finding out and punishing misconduct.
Accordingly, I'd consider it proper for non-economic damages to be capped at a relatively low level, as in Kansas. Unfortunate as it may be, the law should reflect that just because a bad thing happened to a good person doesn't mean there's a villain to punish.
[1] http://www.cjonline.com/news/2012-10-05/kansas-high-court-up...
[2] http://www.ksrevisor.org/statutes/chapters/ch60/060_037_0001...
[3] http://canteyhanger.com/blog/2015/04/28/securing-discovery-f...
There's lesser charges for lesser offences of course- lose your licence, be fined, etc. There are regular publications of who was found guilty of what. My wife eagerly awaits her monthly(?) engineering magazine to read "the blue pages" at the back that name and shame
This is all to day that the whole system here is designed to give very strong incentives to engineers not to assert something is safe when it isn't. And for the most part, it works pretty well.
“Fifty states in the United States of America and no two inspect rides the same way. That’s wrong,” said Ken Martin, an amusement park safety consultant who has been one of the loudest critics of the nation’s patchwork of state laws. “We’re not close to being in the same book, state to state. We’re not even on the same page of the hymnal. We certainly aren’t singing in key.” [1]
"Twenty-nine deaths on amusement rides or water slides have been reported to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission since 2010, spokeswoman Patty Davis said."
To put that figure into perspective however, ~335 million people visit the 400 US amusement parks each year. [2]
So three deaths per year out of 335 million people or visitors (?), for a 0.000001% fatality rate. I'm not sure at that scale if you can get it from three down to zero no matter what you do. This water slide case is a clearly horrendous violation that should never occur. I'm going to assume that with that many parks and that many visitors, with the best case scenario of regulation, with accidents guaranteed to happen, some people will die out of 335 million visitors.
[1] https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/08/24/42...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amusement-parks-the-ride-of-a-l...
I can see that being difficult to oversee, especially with the mobile fairs that pack up the rides and move to another town. Check a ride in one town, and maybe on the way to the next town the truck hits a big pothole and something breaks on the tilt-a-whirl.
But checking a new ride's engineering and design and construction ought to be possible, just like checking that a building is up to code.
Of course, this is self-harming Kansas, so amusement rides are probably checked by a poultry inspector, one day each month.
19. HENRY and SCHOOLEY lacked the technical expertise to properly design a
complex amusement ride such as Verrückt. Neither of the two men possessed any
kind of technical or engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or
safety. As SCHOOLEY admitted, "If we actually knew how to do this, and it could
be done that easily, it wouldn't be that spectacular."
http://www.kansascity.com/latest-news/article206611679.ece/B...
Don't test in production. Or with human lives.
They surely tested it with their own life before. It worked. ;-)
The same logic applies for a majority of cryptocurrency and gig economy startups.
reading the indictment, it seems like the general sort of design that could be implemented safely if they had just hired a ride-engineer with expertise in dynamic forces.
the main problem looks like they were sending rafts with unspecified weights down the chute. overly light rafts would catch air on the second hill and slam into the overhead netting (which is what killed the boy). secondary and tertiary problems were poor raft design (see sections about other injuries to riders) and insufficiently long run-out/braking area at the end.
the use of velcro as a restraint is scary as hell. particularly if you know how quickly velcro wears out after several hundred attachments/detachment cycles.
If that situation occurs for which the netting is there, it follows that the riders are hitting those hoops at full speed at an oblique angle. You're not going to somehow nicely land between those metal hoops and be caught just by the netting alone. (If that were possible, it doesn't seem safe, either, for that matter).
A much more appropriate restraint (if we can even discuss such a thing here) would be for that section of the track to be a fully enclosed, smooth tube.
Whats interesting, and where they probably for the idea for the netting (they have one in the park): https://www.whitewaterwest.com/products/master-blaster/
The owners of this park have a long history of building and operating water parks in general, with the specialty of "lazy river" type infinite pool rides.
This extreme ride is a very different piece of work and gets into the "roller coaster" design which is a whole different piece of engineering.
They had been building and operating rides with similar mechanics (e.g. uphill sections with boosters) for years.
They opened the original Master Blaster (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e2p6Qw4yIE) in 1996.
(Not putting this at the feet of the TV channel, just so insanely wrong priorities on the part of the park)
Now in jail: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43410816
I think they took pity on her, as it was the guy's idea, he assured her it would be safe, she had one kid, and had another one on the way at the time of the incident.
Of course, if she were black she'd probably be in for life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minne...
This is strikingly familiar to something that happened to me as a kid, albeit maybe an order of magnitude or two less serious.
My step mom wanted to feel the impact of my high powered paintball gun. So she held up a cardboard pizza pox and asked me to shoot her.
I shot a few rounds which shred through the box and ended up cutting her stomach.
That said, this definitely falls into that insidious category of failures, those that hurt people consistently, but not enough to raise any unlowerable eyebrows. That is, until something like this happens, and someone dies.
Why, some of them are built so the front kid doesn't fall off at all!
The front fell off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
well what sort of standards are these oil tankers built to?
oh, very rigorous maritime engineering standards
what sort of things?
well the front's not supposed to fall off for a start
what other things?
well there are regulations governing the materials that they can be made of
what materials?
well cardboard's out
and?
no cardboard derivatives
like paper?
no paper, no string, no cello tape
rubber?
no, rubber's out, umm, they have to have a steering wheel, theres a minimum crew requirement
whats the minimum crew?
oh, 1 i supposeYou decide whether that's better or worse...
We need to hold ourselves to at least this good a standard.
Anyone else who rode the ride without being harmed has no grounds to sue...
What problem is solved by serious jail time?
If the current owners of the water park had been afraid of jail, they would not have built such a dangerous contraption.
If jail is supposed to be about deterrence, this gives a (Darwinian) advantage to people who do not care about getting into jail. Is this what you desire?
That's just silly. First, this case is being publicized. A light sentence will not deter anyone watching, but a heavy one will, at least for as long as this case is remembered -- if we have to do this again 20 years from now, so be it. Second, that the owners/operators in this case were not deterred says nothing about future potential owners/operators of similar attractions.
> If jail is supposed to be about deterrence, this gives a (Darwinian) advantage to people who do not care about getting into jail. Is this what you desire?
I don't follow. I think you're way oversimplifying things. Also, most people don't want to go to jail, while the ones that don't care should land there early and often and eventually for long, thus negating their "darwinian advantage".
"Obviously things do fall faster than Newton said."