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Ride/Park Accidents

Serbia - 4 children injured across two incidents a travelling fair within a couple of days of each other.
www.vreme.com

Danger in Serbian amusement parks: After Niš, three children injured in Batajnica - owner arrested - Vreme

Within 24 hours, two different cities, two incidents in amusement parks, four injured young people.
www.vreme.com www.vreme.com

Seoul - 2 hospitalised after log flume boat capsizes ejecting four riders into the water.
www.mk.co.kr

An accident occurred at the water ride of Lotte World Adventure in Seoul.According to Lotte World on.. - MK

An accident occurred at the water ride of Lotte World Adventure in Seoul.According to Lotte World on the 10th, all four passengers fell into the water at 11:20 a.m. at Lotte World located in Jamsil-do..
www.mk.co.kr www.mk.co.kr

And talking of water rides, the adventureland fatality from 2021 was due at court this week for a civil case by the deceased's family against the operator, but this has been settled out of court. Probably the last we will hear of this, with the manufacturer having settled already.
local12.com

Settlement reached in wrongful death lawsuit over amusement park tragedy

The agreement was confirmed by court filings as jury selection was set to begin for the civil trial. The terms of the settlement remain confidential.
local12.com local12.com
 
In case anyone's interested, BBC Panorama have done an investigation into the safety of funfair rides, speaking to industry insiders and those who have been involved in UK accidents.

www.bbc.co.uk

Panorama - Funfairs: How Safe Are They?

Millions of us enjoy the thrill of the funfair. But how safe are the rides we’re getting on? Reporter Rahil Sheikh investigates.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

Frankly, it's quite shocking.
 
Poisson said:
Let me guess - it varies operator to operator and the incident levels are very low. Just like every other risk in life.
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Yes but look around TP. Every nut has a safety line on it, qualified engineers, and qualified staff. Travelling funfairs are IMHO less safe for a variety of reasons.

You're not going to get a faster, scarier waltzer (I'll be first on). But I've seen too many rides supported on blocks of wood that look a bit iffy. If Hyperia was mounted on blocks of wood I'd give it a miss. However it's securely mounted on a sinking island so no worries 😁
 
I never ride funfair rides.

a lot of permanent park flat rides are traveling rides just with proper bolted foundations (sometimes on grass the traveling rides can sink on one leg causing massive amounts of stress)

Traveling rides problem is that it very heavily depends on the operator, there are reputable fairs who take care of their stuff, however there is also the operators who don't, and because the nature of fairs it is essentially hit or miss if you get a good one, and it is difficult to determine the quality from the plac causing a lack of accountability. where as alton towers or thorpe are permanent, and the same known operators each year with known safety standards, and proper foundations.

also at permanent parks, they may loose some money from a ride going down, however since they are POP the impact isn't too large. but as funfairs they are PPR downtime has a direct cost when it goes down, and even if one seat goes down then that seats is costing you money (see BPB).

also (in America at least) they can apparently start dismantling the ride before they close the ride (removing the safety pins on the support pins) and remove a percentage of those support pins

Germany apparently inspects the ride at each installation, I would imagine it is more safe. however inspections aren't perfect.

Ryan the ride mechanic did a good video on this about a year ago:
From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rCj7CPzDsA
 
DiogoJ42 said:
When it comes to safety, I'll trust a family whose entire livelihood is invested in a machine that costs twice what your house does, over a minimum wage teenager working at a theme park any day.
;)
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Are you being serious, proper designed rides like the ones installed at parks have multiple layers of safety, the operators are the first but they aren't the only safety layer. ride restraints

also the fact that their entire livelihood is on one ride is the exact wrong incentive structure, the "minimum wage teenager" isn't going to care if the ride goes down (dosn't cost them money) the ride techs also won't care as it isn't costing them money, the parks such as AT and TP barely have incentives to ensure all the rides are up (primarily being a negative guest experience, merch) and thus the incentives at every level are that if the ride is unsafe, bring it down to ensure it is safe as it isn't worth the risk.

however if your livelihood depends on it, you have massive incentives to ignore safety critical problems see a big crack in a support, and the ride is essentially scrap then your livelihood is screwed, safety relay blown and can't get another one for a few days you could just jumper out the safety system it won't matter.
throughput is everything as for one you are PPR meaning that seat checks may be rushed, and if just one seat is down it would cost thousands of lost revenue over the entire day meaning there is an incentive to ignore restraint problems (jumping out sensors, ignoring broken restraints).

that is also ignoring the quality of some of the rides (e.g look up safeco)

the big parks can afford quality rides (such as B&M, huss, intimin, etc) and afford any big maintenance problems that may pop up (for instance rita is down, no doubt it is expensive to fix)

also who do you think are operating the funfair rides?
 
It was interesting to hear about regulations being ignored, as it feels like a necessity to me for all funfairs to follow regulations down to a T in order to prevent accidents.
 
DiogoJ42 said:
When it comes to safety, I'll trust a family whose entire livelihood is invested in a machine that costs twice what your house does, over a minimum wage teenager working at a theme park any day.
;)
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lol, I’m hoping this is a joke 😁

Last time we visited a travelling fair, the Sizzler operator was feeding his toddler a bottle of milk in the op cabin during a ride cycle. No CCTV, no eyes on the machine, just press the green button and back to dad duties 🤣
 
Not a joke.
Yes, Safeco rides are deadly, and I don't go on them.

Fairs get a bad rep (and I suspect a lot of that is culturally ingrained prejudice against "travelling folk"), but If they were even half as dangerous as some seem to think, they would be illegal by now.
 
DiogoJ42 said:
Not a joke.
Yes, Safeco rides are deadly, and I don't go on them.

Fairs get a bad rep (and I suspect a lot of that is culturally ingrained prejudice against "travelling folk"), but If they were even half as dangerous as some seem to think, they would be illegal by now.
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It isn't about that (at least for me), it is a combination of the lack of regulation, lack of accountability / anonymity of ride operators, lack of ride manufacture awareness and poor incentive structure. (I have also heard about how poor the maintenance practices can be on poorly maintained rides)

I'll go through each point:
there aren't that good regulation of them in the uk, a lot of self certification and no requirement for competency to be proven for techies, theme parks are apparently similar however due to their fixed nature, constant operator and public awareness they have a huge incentive in maintaining their saftey record, and ensuring competency.

the lack of accountability and anonymity of the operators is also a big point, you don't know who owns the breakdance at the funfair, it can be difficult to find out (most people certainty won't research it before riding a ride) and thus it makes it difficult to know weather the ride operator is a good operator who maintains their rides, or an operator who ductapes over cracks.

if you go to a fun fair and see a vortex type ride, it could be made by huss, s&s etc. but it could also be made by safeco (or a chinese counterfit rides, which do exist) etc it can be difficult to tell which manufacture made the ride. there are design reviews before a ride can opperate, however that panorama litterally explain how weak they can be.

lastly the incentive structure, due to the small amount of rides an operator may have and PPR, the incentives are to ensure the ride stays open as long as possible operating with as many seats as possible. however at permanent parks (most are POP) their incentives are to close the ride if a problem occurs, as the only cost is a few quid in merch and some unhappy guests but it outweighs the problems they may had if they operated it. even with PPR parks due to the often more anonymous nature of funfair operators there is often little PR hit if something happens these make the incentives lean towards operating the rides when not properly safe with bad operators.
in addition if most of your income relies on 3 rides operating, and one has some flaw meaning it can't operate (support crack, etc) it would be a massive loss not having that ride operating leading some operators to just run them


the problem is that you never know if you have a good or poor operator, I am sure with a good operator they are perfectly safe however poor operators add quite a bit of risk as the lack of regulations don't ensure proper practices.

the statistics really show the added danger in the past 10 years, there have been 7 deaths, and thousands of injuries even at big events, such as the incident in Birmingham. However in theme parks there have been what 2 major incidents I can recall in the last like 20 years (smiler and drayon manor) and only one caused a death.
 
The statistics are meaningless unless you provide the number of overall riders, who come off the rides uninjured.
That is less than one death, and a hundred injuries a year, out of how many millions of riders?

Even with travelling fairs, you are far more likely to be injured on the road going to and from the fair, than on the fair itself.

Statistically, the evidence is incomplete without total numbers of users...and they are not accurately known, or collated centrally.

If an operator continues to have issues and claims following accidents...the operator quickly ceases trading through a lack of insurance.

Bit like the dead rodent really at the Beach...but that was static.
 
rob666 said:
The statistics are meaningless unless you provide the number of overall riders, who come off the rides uninjured.
That is less than one death, and a hundred injuries a year, out of how many millions of riders?

Even with travelling fairs, you are far more likely to be injured on the road going to and from the fair, than on the fair itself.

Statistically, the evidence is incomplete without total numbers of users...and they are not accurately known, or collated centrally.

If an operator continues to have issues and claims following accidents...the operator quickly ceases trading through a lack of insurance.

Bit like the dead rodent really at the Beach...but that was static.
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Yes you are entirely correct, however statistics are useless, however if you focus on ride types theme parks and funfairs commonly share (flat rides / coasters) ignoring water rides (which is a more dangerous ride type, and I have (and will continue to) criticize it for that), the amount of deaths at UK theme parks has been zero for the past what 20+ years, however the number of deaths on fairgrounds is 7 in the last 10 years, we don't know the number of guests riding each ride, however that is a significant difference, between the two

the probability is a more interesting question, the key problem is that it is a roulette between good operators or bad operators. I am sure with a good operator the chance of injury is the same as any permanent park. for bad operators though it could be much, much higher however it is difficult to know if they are good or bad. without legally required competencies is also questionable, you can say about how an airline is perfectly safe but if I told you that the maintenance engineers haven't been checked for competency, would you fly? No even through aircraft have redundancies on redundancies on redundancies and may be statistically safer you wouldn't, but with funfairs how do you know they are competent or not?
 
flyingguitar said:
...however statistics are useless, ...

...the probability is a more interesting question, the key problem is that it is a roulette between good operators or bad operators. ...
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Statistics are most useful...as long as you have complete information for your analysis.
Accident probability is what it is all about...but again...where are the statistics differentiating between good and bad operators???
There aren't any accurate statistics of safe user numbers...at all...so how do you calculate the safety probabilities between operators?
You can't.
 
rob666 said:
Statistics are most useful...as long as you have complete information for your analysis.
Accident probability is what it is all about...but again...where are the statistics differentiating between good and bad operators???
There aren't any accurate statistics of safe user numbers...at all...so how do you calculate the safety probabilities between operators?
You can't.
Click to expand...
I meant to say the statistics in this case are basically useless to get a good accurate look at the difference between parks and fairs, however if you consider the ride types each share (flat rides and coasters) there have been 0 deaths at theme parks in like 20 years vs 7 at fairs in the last 10. Even without rider statistics there is very clearly a significant difference.

Also statistics between opperators are very hard to get as the probabilities are low meaning a ton of data is required, we could be talking about probabilities such as 1 in 100,000 vs 1 in 100,000,000. And if something goes wrong, it is too late
 
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