At Six Flags Great America in Gurnee Ill., there once was a ride called “The Edge”. It was pretty good. Then something went wrong and some people were injured on it, so it got torn down.
But I’ve been told that those people were not just injured, they were killed. I don’t remember hearing that on the news. Does anyone know the dope on this?
I haven’t been on SDMB very long, but I already know the routine: go to http://www.google.com and search for “Six Flags,” “gurnee” and “accident.” Your questions will be answered.
Y’know, I could’ve sworn when I saw this topic in the GQ listing that the answer to the question in this thread would be “Dave Evans.”
That was my first thought too, then I thought it was about the Dick Francis book, then I thought it was about the Baldwin/Hopkins movie, then I thought it was about the pizza from Pizza Hut. Shows you how long it takes the board to load for me, lol.
I remember hearing about the accident when it happened, but I don’t think anyone was killed, and I don’t think they tore it down because of that, I think they tore it down to build a newer coaster. (They sort of rotate like that, you’ll notice when they built Batman it was in the middle of the park, obviously replacing something less popular.) Most theme parks have a ride similar to, if not identical to the Edge, so I know they weren’t specificly banned or anything. (Now that I think about it, at Paramount’s Great America in Santa Clara, I think theirs is still running and still called The Edge!)
I also remember a few years earlier, Kings Island in southern Ohio had a ride called the Bat that was one of the first suspended coasters that someone was killed on and it was torn down. (I think the car came off it rail and went flying across the park.) It was quite a few years later when all the bugs were worked out that you saw that sort of ride everywhere.
Please keep in mind that these are personal recollections from my childhood, and may lean more on gossip than fact. Sorry I don’t have a link to back it up (I’m on limited time now, thanks to NetZero!) but you might want to search the archives at the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times.
Gurnee is a link to the original accident, in 1984.
pk , you heard they were killed from “where” ? Just another FOAF thing? Can anyone seriously imagine that three amusement park deaths could be hushed up? Rubbish.
Great Scott, Samclem is that a “for-real” website? Go look at http://members.aol.com/rides911/accidents.htm
How can all these people get hurt, even killed, at amusement parks, at Disney World even, and we here in Mid-America hear nothing about it? Are Disney’s lawyers that good? Or is this site a Weird Earl? Or have I just not been paying attention?
There are at least a dozen amusement park deaths listed at this site that evidently must have been “hushed up”, 'cause I sure don’t remember putting anything like “hey, you know, people can get killed at amusement parks” into my factoid memory banks, and I’m normally the first one on my block to glom onto stuff like that. As a matter of fact, what I have in my factoid memory banks is, “Amusement park rides are perfectly safe and are inspected frequently by qualified state inspectors.” According to this website, I’ve been living with my head up my derriere all this time.
Doesn’t sound like they died to me, although I have to admit to having heard the same story.
DDG As a parent of three kids under the age of 15, I, too, am concerned with their safety vis-a-vis amusement parks, among other locations.
But, sheesh , how did you and I not hear about a death in an amusement park in some other state? It might just be that we didn’t read the right newspaper that day that had the story. A death at an amusement park in Kansas might just not make my Akron, Ohio paper. Or maybe it did, and I didn’t read the incredibly small blurb about it.
If you think
that these deaths never hit the news in any newspaper, then I think you are misinformed. That is a polite way of saying, full of shit.
If I have read your response in haste and not realized a tongue-in-cheek response, for this I apologize. If I read it right, then please give more proof of “hushed up” deaths.
I wasn’t meaning to imply there was a world-wide conspiracy to hush up amusement park deaths, I was just expressing my amazement that the media haven’t been filing reports out the wazoo on something like this. In a journalistic world where we’re inundated nightly with stories about the ghastly things that can happen to children (airbags, for one), I was merely asking “huccome?” we don’t hear more about it. Is it just a non-issue where Tom Brokaw is concerned? Too many other things going on, with better sound bites?
Especially I wonder why we don’t hear more about the ones at Disney World. Now there I think you can chalk up another one for the Mouse’s justly famed legal department. Not that they rushed over to Peter Jennings’ office and warned him to keep his mouth shut, but rather that they probably rushed into the breach with alternate doses of hush money and threats, aimed at the victims’ families.
And yeah, I don’t like Disney very much to begin with, I’d believe anything of them. I’m such a cynic.
“Especially I wonder why we don’t hear more about the ones at Disney World”
So there have been deaths at Disney World? How many? When?
Don’t get me wrong. I am no lover of Disney’s Gestapo-like mentality, but I think you are making an issue of a non-issue.
The nightly news(and your local paper) picks stories which they feel are important. They can’t cover them all. And, yes, I think they sometimes get priorities ass-backward. But the media does NOT cover up something as newsworthy as a death. It might be done in some little town where the editor/sherrif/mayor are beholdin’ to some individual who has economic power, etc. over them, but certainly not at a major corporate facility.
Interestingly, I notice snopes lists eight “guests” deaths at Disneyland since the park opened in 1955. But they don’t list Disneyworld deaths. But then, Barbara and David are based in SoCal.
There have been no Disneyworld Deaths…
There nearly was…
When they were gonna open Space Mountain, they did test with slightly unsecure dummies. No one noticed that the dummies were sorta off seat wise but still sitting. About a 2 hours before the ride was to open, someone noticed a scuff on a dummy head and questioned it. To prove that everything was fine, the dummies were put in upright and tightened into the harness so that it would remain sitting bolt upright. They came back headless due to a metal support bar welded in wrong. Now can you imagine if they did not catch that?
I got that story from one of the people who used to run the ride back in the late eighties.
If you want to read more on Disney Deaths and some other things like some hilarious tales of some of the employees and their hijinks, then read
Mouse Tales : A Behind-The-Ears Look at Disneyland
grade a stuff…a very funny funny read.
Yes. And next time, the polite version will suffice.
The ride remained there for over a year after, often not working and just sitting there. When I asked an attendant about the incident, he said they were just hurt, and required emergency attention.
Aw, mice! er… Rats! You beat me to it! A good book, although it did shatter one illusion for me. I’d thought that Tinkerbell had plummetted to her death, but she was only stuck on the wire for a while. BTW “Tinkerbell” was performed by a 70-something-year-old aerialist named “Tiny”.
Mouse Tales details the deaths, injuries, lawsuits and policies at Disneyland. Since it’s been out for several years it won’t have the Columbia incident that happened two years ago. The two incidents that I remember from this book are the worker who was killed when she leaned against the wall on Carousel of Progress and was crushed between the stationary and moving walls, and the guy who sneaked into the park. In this case he was walking along the Monorail track. Security tried to warn him off, as there was a train coming. The intruder dove onto one of the fiberglass awnings that keep things from falling on people on the walkways below. Unfortunately, the clearance between the awning and the train is only about two inches.
Okay, I’ll repeat the link that Samclem gave.
http://members.aol.com/rides911/accidents.htm
Man killed on Walt Disney World’s Splash Mountain
I’m not saying the media is covering it up–I’m saying the media is ignoring the issue.
If this is a genuine website, and not someone’s idea of an elaborate practical joke (which was my original question, BTW), look at the list.
Here is the text only–all of these are links on the above site.
And this is just the Disney stuff. There’s more, dealing with other amusement parks.
Look at all the hoo-hah surrounding children and airbags, and children and chicken pox vaccine, and children and obesity. Hardly a Nightly News segment goes by that doesn’t have some sort of “evil thing that can happen to children”, and after I read your website, I suddenly realized the issue of “amusement park safety” was all news to me. So I started wondering where it had been all this time.
When was the last time you saw someone on Sally Jessy or Maury Povich, “My child was injured at Disney Land!” I think that the amusement park lawyers rush over there and pay the family big bucks, and get them to sign waivers, to keep them from going public. And since nobody ever appears on 20/20 or Maury Povich complaining that their child was injured at Disney Land, the rest of the media hound pack doesn’t catch the scent, and so we don’t hear about it.
I’m not suggesting a coverup, just that we don’t hear much about this sort of thing, and I’m wondering why. Judging from the list of occurences at the website, I don’t think it’s adequate to say “well, small-town newspapers don’t have a wide circulation”.
And as for a coverup not emanating from a major corporate facility, well, I lived through the Watergate years, and IMHO the more money that’s at stake, the bigger the coverup. Disney is very big money indeed.
And Peter Jennings works for them. 
I’ll third the recommendation of the excellent book, Mouse Tales. In addition to the Disneyland deaths others have mentioned, several dumb kids have died while trying to swim to or from Tom Sawyer’s Island.
But the book isn’t just about mishaps. It talks about the creme de la creme corporation, Retlaw, which exists for the convenience of the Disney family when they’re at Disneyland.
It describes Walt’s apartment over the fire station on Main Street USA, and when he used it and how often he visited the park while he was alive (he was there all the time, checking on things, even while working on movies and running the Disney empire).
There’s a chapter on what it’s like to work there.
There’s a few pages about the exclusive “33 Club” in the New Orleans area of the park.
And, it’s an unauthorized book, so it’s as warty as you’d want.
For my contribution to fighting ignorance this week, I did a quick check of some of the stories on the Amusement Ride Accident Report website mentioned in this thread. And they do seem legitimate to me. Or else it’s a hoax that involves both the LA Times and Orlando Sentinal over a period of several years and multiple stories (or involves Lexis/Nexis). So they’re real, but also these incidents are clearly not being completely suppressed.
However, I’m not sure the danger of amusement parks is as bad as the site makes it sound. First, the site features a bunch of stories for each accident, including stories about accidents several years ago, so casually reading it could make you think there are many times more accidents that there really are.
Also, and I don’t mean by this to let amusement park owners completely off the hook, or minimize the impact of these accidents on the people involved and their families, but to be fair about deciding whether there’s an epidemic of amusement park accidents, you need to look at rates (per person per day or something), not just absolute numbers. And then you should compare the accident rates per person per day with other kinds of recreational activity – softball, picnics, water-skiing, (driving to the amusement park-- my semi-WAG is that driving to the park is probably much more dangerous than the rides), etc.
To be sure, amusement park rides should be safer than something like waterskiing, where you have a lot more choice over the level of risk you want (and can control it more), but there might turn out to be more pressing concerns than amusement park rides.
And just to make it clear,
quote:
There have been no Disneyworld Deaths…
Is false. There are newspaper stories on deaths (well, at least one) on rides at both Disneyland and Disneyworld. See the site mentioned above if you want gory details.
FWIW, the Los Angeles Times wrote extensive stories about the death of a visitor to Disneyland a couple of years ago. There were then followup stories about Disneyland’s rather cozy relationship with the Anaheim PD and how it was able to avoid getting OSHA inspectors to review the situation (an employee was injured as well in this particular accident).
A young boy was injured last year on the Roger Rabbit Ride and has suffered severe brain damage that has required him to be placed in a rehabilitatino center. The Times has covered this story extensively as have the local TV stations.
I said no Disneyworld deaths…I knew about the Disneyland ones…the grossest I think was the Peoplemover ones.
But since I was wrong about that one…I was wrong, sorry. But it does prove a point. I had never heard of the death at Splash Mountain in Disneyworld and I am living near Disneyland. So you can see how it may be hushed or lost in the shuffle of media even when you live near its older “father” park.
The one Bob is talking about is the boat accident where the iron buckle they last the ship too was lashed too early and was torn off by the ship as it came to rest. The 8 pound buckle smashed a employees arm and then whallopped some poor Japanese tourist in the head. He died on the way to the hospital.
It is true though that getting hurt in Disneyland may entail a long wait for actual “outside” help. I have noticed in the last couple of accidents that made local news that ppl are told to refrain from calling “outside lines” and that Disney is handling it.
Sounds more like they want to snow the details first. But thats IMHO