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To: sipow

I think it’s a more complex question.

We don’t put dummies on horses to evaluate how dangerous horseback riding is.

Here is my SWAG — the ride is about as innocent as white water rafting if ridden properly, which 99.999% or so riders have done. Again consider what an outlier the sole death case was. This was spectacular, a doozie of a death. No bell curve here. I’d say let’s investigate what kind of MOVE made by the rider could launch him into a wall like that, and then do we have telltale evidence of him alone doing it?

It’s like a gun. If I point it away from myself and shoot, the mishaps will be few. If I stick it to my head and shoot, it’s a different story. I would not want a world in which grossly improper behavior in use brings a ban on a thing.


190 posted on 04/04/2018 2:42:37 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Tryin' hard to win the No-Bull Prize.)
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To: HiTech RedNeck
There is a significant difference between activities such as horseback riding. There is a significantly different legal responsibility for providing safety in the case of an amusement ride.

I don't disagree with your suggesting to investigate the details of what happened in this case. That should certainly be done.

They should also investigate the design and implementation of the ride to see if reasonable attempts to provide safety were made.

The lack of attention to safety and poor design in this case are outliers as well. I don't think every injury or death at an amusement park should be treated criminally. I think that this case is an outlier.

Look at this photo from a test of the slide:

Clearly the possibility of a raft flying off the ride was well known. They did attempt to address this issue by installing safety nets on the ride. But look at the design of the nets:

They put netting supported by metal hoops. Any halfway decent engineer would look at that and immediately see the danger. The netting would stop someone slowly and spread out the force - but if you were to hit the metal hoop, it would concentrate the force where it hit you. In this case it chopped the kid's head off.

Unknown and unforeseeable risks are something that must be assumed in many situations. This risk was neither unknown nor unforeseeable.

194 posted on 04/04/2018 9:53:26 AM PDT by sipow
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