Board 8 > I want to talk about the Verrückt water slide for a moment

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For some reason Youtube has been recommending me a lot of videos about amusement park accidents lately (I blame me watching Rollercoaster Tycoon Let's Plays). I've been finding them fascinating, but no story has been more stunning that Verrckt, the world's tallest water slide that was closed after a kid died riding it.

It's a horrible story, but what astonishes me is just how RIDICULOUSLY dangerous the ride was designed. The people who built it seem like some of the dumbest, most lackadaisical idiots ever and I'm surprised they were allowed to get away with opening it. And it's not like it was some super old ride that was built before the time of good safety standards, this was in 2014. There's just so many things wrong with the story, and you can see a lot of it in the video:

https://youtu.be/ulIcekOTOqg

There's a lot of things about this story that blows my mind:

• The part in the video at 3:13 where the ride designers admit that every single professional engineer and mathematician told them the ride was dangerous and they were like "Pssh, what do those eggheads know?"
• The fact that people saw the raft go flying off the track and plowing into the ground over and over again and they still were eagerly waiting to ride it.
• That the "solution" to make it a safer ride was to put netting attached to metal hoops over the hill where the raft kept flying off. It's like they wanted to kill people even easier than before.

There's more in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verr%C3%BCckt_(water_slide)

State legislators from the area passed a law allowing Schlitterbahn to "self-inspect" its attractions as it did in Texas, unlike all other amusement parks in Kansas, which were subject to state inspection.[3]

Yeah, it's always a good sign when you let businesses self-regulate. The law was changed, although it's probably mainly because the child who died on the ride was a state legislator's son.

The water slide was conceived on the spur of the moment by Henry, after a team from Travel Channel'sXtreme Waterparks asked at a trade show what he was working on.[6] After initial attempts to pitch the idea to vendors at the show failed,[2] Henry decided to build the slide himself,[7] enlisting John Schooley as the ride's lead designer.[3][8] Henry had described the new ride to the Travel Channel crew as a "speed blaster", a term he had likewise improvised.

The thing was built because one of the park owners randomly pulled the idea out of his ass just so he could have a record-breaking attraction. It's not really a surprise it wasn't designed very well.

A safety consultant hired by the park shortly before Verrckt's scheduled opening told Henry it was unfinished and unsafe. When complete, he recommended that only riders 16 and over be allowed on the ride. Henry, who had no formal training in engineering, decided 14 was better. Right before the opening, however, he dropped any age limit.

Again, it feels the entire damn thing was cobbled together on various whims by amateurs who had more visions of being attention-getting than people who actually planned things out.

However, at least thirteen riders suffered non-fatal injuries, such as concussions or slipped and herniated discs many of which had longterm effects after either hitting the netting or being thrown into it. After a Missouri man thrown from the raft suffered facial injuries in June 2016, the park's operations manager allegedly attempted to cover up the incident, telling lifeguards what to write in their reports; it is believed that was not the only accident where this happened.[3]

And of course, going hand in hand with laziness and greed, you have cover-ups of any failures that happen instead of addressing them.

The 2018 indictment against Schlitterbahn wrote that Henry and Schooley "lacked technical expertise to design a properly functioning water slide" and did not perform standard engineering procedures or calculations on how the slide would operate.[8] Instead they used "crude trial-and-error methods" to test its performance, out of haste to launch the ride.[8] According to court documents, Schooley conceded that, "If we actually knew how to do this, and it could be done that easily, it wouldnt be that spectacular."[43]

And the perfect capper, in the end the criminal charges against the people who made it were dropped thanks to a technicality.

What amazes me the most about this is how this kind of behavior, failing to do things properly, continuing to do things unsafe or immoral despite all logic, covering up anything that might stop it, and getting away with no true consequences of it in the end seems like it happens all the time, in so many situations with other businesses and governments, etc. It's just kind of mind-blowing how dumb of a world we live in that these kind of things aren't put to a stop before the inevitable disaster happens.

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Dang...

That was...quite a read
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