A reader last week asked me the question that has been on the mind of many of us who love theme parks.
“How safe are we?”
The death of a rider on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia earlier this month has shaken the confidence of many theme park fans. A 42-year-old rider fell from the ride on its final turn into the station, during the coaster’s last airtime moment. A photo of the incident appears to show the rider’s clamshell lap restraint had opened.
That should not have happened. The coaster’s manufacturer has had a perfect safety record until now for its restraint systems, which are designed with multiple redundancies. The odds of all three of the rachets on this specific model’s restraint system failing are infinitesimal. It seems more likely that there was some catastrophic failure elsewhere that made the restraint system’s backups irrelevant. That’s the chilling thought that has so many fans concerned. Are we safe, if a ride’s designed safety systems cannot protect us?
But there is no way for fans to know exactly what caused the tragedy in Georgia until an investigation tells us. Following the accident last week, many Six Flags theme parks posted a message to their social media accounts, reiterating the company’s commitment to guest safety. Yet just a few hours after that, Six Flags’ Cedar Point theme park had to close its Millennium Force coaster after a metal part flew off of it into a guest area.
The park’s maintenance team got the ride opened over the weekend, but the mishap reminded many fans of a similar incident a few years ago on Top Thrill Dragster. In that case, the flying part hit and severely injured a guest. But a lucky trajectory for a flying part does not negate the risk.
Platitudes about commitment do not answer the question, “how safe are we?” Only frank details about post-incident investigations can do that. It is unreasonable to expect immediate answers from an investigation that should take all the time that investigators need to do their jobs right. But fans deserve to hear details from Six Flags about the investigation and its scope, not statements written by PR teams rather than engineers and forensic experts.
Theme park managers might hope that time will fade memories and that if they can just ride out the initial wave of bad press, fans will return. One school of thought in public relations teaches not to draw attention to your problems, lest you create a “Streisand Effect” that serves to remind the public of what you want them to forget.
That’s insulting to people who trust the parks with their safety. The longer that the question, “how safe are we?” lingers in the mind of fans, the greater the chance that many of those fans simply will choose to stop going to parks, wrecking the business. Maybe it is time for the people who own and manage theme parks to ask, “how safe are we?”
The best way to protect the safety of the theme park business is to be clear about what’s being done to protect the safety of its fans.