11 ms·

Water Slide That Decapitated Boy Violated Basic Design Standards

• badloginagain 9y ago
  Surprised the park hasn't gone totally bankrupt from the amount of class-action suits available here.
  • sparrish 9y ago
    This is in Kansas, where most folks aren't as sue-happy as the coasts of our country. Out here, if you get a minor injury, rub some dirt on it and treat it like a hill - get over it.
    • gowld 9y ago
      How do you rub some dirt and get over a decapitation? Maybe if Kansans held each other to higher standards of accountability they wouldn't kill a kid on a water slide.
      • daveFNbuck 9y ago
        You don't get a class action from one decapitation. You need to have a large group of people with the same injuries. Those are the people that shrug it off and don't sue.
    • FeteCommuniste 9y ago
      Not sure even the Black Knight could get over a decapitation.
    • crazypyro 9y ago
      What are you talking about? They already settled a civil lawsuit for ~20 million with the park and engineering firms very shortly after it happened. This is the criminal case.
    • bearcobra 9y ago
      Based on the data from the National Center for State Courts, there doesn't appear to be much of a correlation between coastal proximity and the rate of civil cases. http://www.ncsc.org/Sitecore/Content/Microsites/PopUp/Home/CSP/CSP_Intro http://www.ncsc.org/Sitecore/Content/Microsites/PopUp/Home/C...
  • kyleblarson 9y ago
    I'm surprised that any insurer would issue a policy for a place like this without doing enough due diligence to see how sketchy it is.
  • ryanmerket 9y ago
    According to a news report I read they settled with those folks for $19M
  • djrogers 9y ago
    Class action? Who would be in the class other than the family of the deceased? Anyone else who rode the ride without being harmed has no grounds to sue...
    • DFHippie 9y ago
      Apparently there were a lot of lesser injuries before this fatality.
    • jonhendry18 9y ago
      Another person got fractured orbital bones and other injuries from the ride. So they probably narrowly avoided being decapitated as well.
• sbarre 9y ago
  Ugh, it says they rushed the design and build in order to impress a Travel Channel show/producer.. (Not putting this at the feet of the TV channel, just so insanely wrong priorities on the part of the park)
  • JBlue42 9y ago
    Seems similar to the one who shot and killed her boyfriend (husband?) in front of their kid for a YouTube prank.
    • ada1981 9y ago
      Wait, what?
      • JBlue42 9y ago
        When it happened: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40438207 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40438207 Now in jail: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43410816 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43410816
        • jonhendry18 9y ago
          She got a pretty short sentence, to be served in multiple short periods of incarceration. I suppose so she isn't away from the kids very long at a time. 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.
      • slavik81 9y ago
        They ran a YouTube channel. He convinced his girlfriend to shoot him with a pistol while he held a thick book in front of himself, expecting the book to stop the bullet. The book did not stop the bullet, and he died from the gunshot wound. She pled guilty to manslaughter. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minnesota-guilty-plea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minne...
• teraflop 9y ago
  The full indictment [1] is well worth reading. The most relevant sections for HN, in my opinion: > 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/4/4/1/2/4412070/2018-03-21_indictment__miles_swkc__filed_redacted.pdf https://www.wycocourtks.org/uploads/4/4/1/2/4412070/2018-03-...
  • Analemma_ 9y ago
    Move fast and break things!
    • nielsbot 9y ago
      "things"
    • HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
      This is why most of us aren't real engineers. When real engineers are sloppy people die. When we are sloppy, our industry leaders defend it as being 'pragmatic'.
      • crazypyro 9y ago
        Its almost like completely different problems have completely different design constraints... There are plenty of "real" engineers who design stuff that have very little safety implications, such as optimizing electrical boards or minimizing costs in manufacturing.
        • theresistor 9y ago
• willglynn 9y ago
  From the indictment: 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." Full text: http://www.kansascity.com/latest-news/article206611679.ece/BINARY/Read%20the%20full%20Schlitterbahn%20corporation%20indictment http://www.kansascity.com/latest-news/article206611679.ece/B...
  • itronitron 9y ago
    so basically, they were doing water slide _research_ instead of water slide _engineering_
    • thisacctforreal 9y ago
      Water slide experimentation might be more apt. Don't test in production. Or with human lives.
      • wolfgke 9y ago
        > Don't test in production. Or with human lives. They surely tested it with their own life before. It worked. ;-)
    • munificent 9y ago
      "Disrupting the water slide economy."
  • slg 9y ago
    >"If we actually knew how to do this, and it could be done that easily, it wouldn't be that spectacular." The same logic applies for a majority of cryptocurrency and gig economy startups.
    • ams6110 9y ago
• codezero 9y ago
  I was reading a story about how this was built by unqualified engineers and I was really confused how that happened, but a quick summary: 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.
  • TylerE 9y ago
    That's not really true. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e2p6Qw4yIE) in 1996.
    • codezero 9y ago
      Fair point, I guess the question then remains: were they qualified to build those either?
      • technofiend 9y ago
        I can only share my personal experience but I was lofted into the air and then slammed down so hard I was worried for my safety on one of their rides in Galveston. It's too bad they didn't swallow their pride and acknowledge the fact they were successful enough that their newer rides needed engineering oversight instead of layperson guesswork.
      • jonhendry18 9y ago
        Perhaps they only build parks in low-regulation states.
• txsh 9y ago
  If I’m reading this correctly, the ride opened in 2014 but the kid was decapitated in 2016. So not only did they rush its construction but they had two years to fix it and chose not to. Incredible.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Or, in two years, they never realized that they needed to fix it. You decide whether that's better or worse...
    • Twirrim 9y ago
      two years, despite repeated reports of injuries, people reporting that they'd lifted off the surface etc, among other warnings.
      • empath75 9y ago
        Which they covers up by altering the reports.
    • dabbledash 9y ago
      If you read the indictment, it’s clear they always knew about this flaw.
  • pimlottc 9y ago
    New features beats reducing technical debt every time.
• walrus01 9y ago
  if you search "verruckt" on youtube there's a number of point-of-view camera recordings of people riding the thing, before it was shut down. 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.
  • azernik 9y ago
    Another way of looking at it is that the main problem was putting netting above the track; one roller-coaster engineering principle I've seen mentioned that this ride broke was "no obstructions in the path of the rider" - catching air and slamming hard into the ground may have been less dangerous than hitting a hard overhead obstruction mid-air at high speed.
    • dawnerd 9y ago
      Yeah, when it first opened and I saw the netting... that was a huge red flag. If you have to put netting up it's not safe end of story. The whole ride is just a lesson in what not to do, and hopefully other parks will learn from it.
      • kazinator 9y ago
        ... netting that is held together with metal hoops, through which you're shooting at high speeds. 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.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• vkou 9y ago
  "I am afraid that this will have a chilling effect against innovation in this area" is the sort of way that software engineers respond to similar problems in their space. We need to hold ourselves to at least this good a standard.
  • smitherfield 9y ago
    With notable exceptions (e.g. Therac-25, or self-driving cars) most of us have the luxury of working in spaces where mistakes may be annoying or costly, but not deadly.
  • Zak 9y ago
    I agree. When working on products that have the potential to directly maim or kill people, we should involve domain experts and subject them to rigorous testing.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• rossdavidh 9y ago
  Wow. If there was any warning sign short of a dead customer that could have persuaded them to not open/close down this ride, they had it. Repeatedly.
• aaron695 9y ago
  Kinda a pointless story. Hire engineers when engineering dangerous things. I like this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4-G08myaz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4-G08myaz4 Also a bit pointless as a video but the comments make it worth while.
• Arainach 9y ago
  A group of founders who wanted to move fast, ignore industry regulations that they didn't personally understand the historical reason for, and chose to keep pushing forward even when they realized they were doing unethical or illegal things.....where have I heard that story before? I've heard such tactics praised often enough here on Hacker News.
• some_random 9y ago
  Given that it killed someone in such a violent and (at least in retrospect) predictable way, I would certainly hope that it failed to conform to "basic design standards". 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.
  • Noumenon72 9y ago
    > Given that it killed someone in such a violent and (at least in retrospect) predictable way, I would certainly hope that it failed to conform to "basic design standards". 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 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 suppose
• throwaway-hn123 9y ago
  What's the fuss about? People need to vote with their wallets instead of crying out, like sheep, for regulations. If you don't like the look of a ride, don't get on it. Liberal snowflakes.
• SolarNet 9y ago
  For a moment I thought "How to design slides" also on the front page was referencing this.
• mabbo 9y ago
  In Canada, a certified Professional Engineer (a protected title not just anyone can use) would have had to sign off on such a construction. They would have had to certify it was safe. And if someone died because they ignored engineering principles and signed off on it anyway, they can be criminally charged and sent to jail. 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.
  • bambax 9y ago
    It's surprising it isn't the case everywhere; can you really open a ride in the US without a prior safety inspection??
    • adventured 9y ago
      Amusement park regulations are state-based, and literally vary for every state in the US - “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/2016/08/24/424278.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/08/24/42... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amusement-parks-the-ride-of-a-lifetime/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amusement-parks-the-ride-of-a-l...
• eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
  Does anybody know if there were any safety inspections of the park by the city, state or federal bodies? If so, how did it pass the inspections?
  • gwbas1c 9y ago
    Usually city inspectors don't know enough to evaluate those kinds of things.
    • Johnny555 9y ago
      Which is why they require engineering signoff for things they can't evaluate themselves. Try to replace a beam in your basement to create a longer span and the building inspector isn't going to do load/span calculations himself, the building department is going to require a PE to sign off on the design.
• chrisacky 9y ago
  I'm a new father of two boys and couldn't imagine the torment I'd go through if something tragic would happen to them, pain like that cannot be "made right" by a simple settlement, however large. What irks me though in this instance, is that Caleb's father is state legislature in Kansas and because of laws he has voted for, (or rather against) his compensation should have been capped at $300k -- but instead through "getting around laws" which he himself has helped pass, he was awarded one of the largest settlements in Kansas history[1]. No sum of money could ever compensate such loss, however, when he's made a career out of denying other Kansians for similar losses it just seems hypocritical to me. Even after receiving the settlement money, he hasn't had an epiphany moment and campaigned/voted to help other families with similar losses. If ever there was negligence sufficient to warrant one of the largest tort settlement in his state, this strikes me as a short-runner, but what about other families, why is it a one rule for me, and one rule for my constituents. [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-scott-schwab-not-a-hypocrite/ 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?..
  • pm90 9y ago
    If you haven't, I urge you to read this:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/opinion/conservatism-honesty-crime-gop.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/opinion/conservatism-hone...
  • smitherfield 9y ago
    > [It] could be a load of crap and out of context falsehoods, written by authors who have an interest in raising the cap in Kansas. 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. 1½ times the defendants' total (not yearly!) profits from Verrükt is almost certainly well above $20 million, and a judge might well allow the argument that the defendants demonstrated wanton and/or willful negligence in operating a) the entire Kansas City waterpark, capping damages at 1½ times its total profits, and/or b) the entire Schlitterbahn parent corporation, capping damages at 1½ times its total profits. 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-upholds-limits-damages-lawsuits http://www.cjonline.com/news/2012-10-05/kansas-high-court-up... [2] http://www.ksrevisor.org/statutes/chapters/ch60/060_037_0001.html http://www.ksrevisor.org/statutes/chapters/ch60/060_037_0001... [3] http://canteyhanger.com/blog/2015/04/28/securing-discovery-from-a-texas-non-party http://canteyhanger.com/blog/2015/04/28/securing-discovery-f...
• gyrgtyn 9y ago
  No one from the state showed up and said "you can't let people ride that" ?
  • jonhendry18 9y ago
    It's Kansas.
• dandare 9y ago
  There is only one question that really matters in this story: will the managers do serious jail time or not.
  • wolfgke 9y ago
    > There is only one question that really matters in this story: will the managers do serious jail time or not. What problem is solved by serious jail time?
    • cryptonector 9y ago
      It's about deterrence. Make the next Schlitterbanh's owners think thrice about safety and engineering.
      • wolfgke 9y ago
        > It's about deterrence. Make the next Schlitterbanh's owners think thrice about safety and engineering. 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?
        • cryptonector 9y ago
          > If the current owners of the water park had been afraid of jail, they would not have built such a dangerous contraption. 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".
• Deestan 9y ago
  In any discussion about regulations killing business dreams, remember that this is the kind of business they are killing.
• jonhendry18 9y ago
  This quote from the responsible parties says it all: "Obviously things do fall faster than Newton said."