Kid Dies on Disney World Ride

One other death was reported at Disney World this year. A 77-year-old woman who was in poor health from diabetes and several ministrokes died in February after going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at the Magic Kingdom. A medical examiner's report said her death "was not unexpected."

WTF

The nurses climbed up
Our face paled
And there was no doubt at all
No two ways about it
Was the day Disney's dream debased

Saw a mouse, who flapped at my wife
And she told him what
And she told him what had gone down
Who then did not know the extent of the show
The people had died in the mouth of their ride

Disney

And Dopey and Mickey, Brer and Pluto
Secretly prayed
And there was no doubt at all
No two ways about it
Was the day Disney's dream debased

Disney

Dark glasses on Western Union
Man the gates
The dream, an innocent meets her fate
Far away from Appalachia and the city hate
The day the day the day

When there was no doubt at all
No maybe about it
It was the day the dream debased

Disney

I remembered it from
The back of my mind
The tune that I wrote
In fallen dreams
Anthem to
Creator of all that had stopped

So there was no doubt at all
No two ways about it
It was the day the dream debased

!!!!!

That should soooo be a television show. Disney'd make a lot off of that.

June 1966: Thomas Guy Cleveland, a 19-year-old Northridge, CA, resident, was killed when he attempted to sneak into Disneyland along the Monorail track. Cleveland scaled the park's sixteen-foot high outer fence on a Grad Nite and climbed onto the Monorail track, intending to jump or climb down once inside the park. Cleveland ignored a security guard's shouted warnings of an approaching Monorail train and failed to leap clear of the track. He finally climbed down onto a fiberglass canopy beneath the track, but the clearance wasn't enough -- the oncoming train struck and killed him, dragging his body 30 to 40 feet down the track.

August 1967: Ricky Lee Yama, a 17-year-old Hawthorne, CA, resident, was killed when he disregarded safety instructions and exited his People Mover car as the ride was passing through a tunnel. Yama slipped as he was jumping from car to car and was crushed to death beneath the wheels of oncoming cars.

June 1973: Bogden Delaurot, an 18-year-old Brooklyn resident, drowned trying to swim across the Rivers of America. Delaurot and his 10-year-old brother managed to stay on Tom Sawyer Island past its dusk closing time by climbing the fence separating the island from the burning settlers' cabin. When they decided to leave the island a few hours later, they chose to swim across the river rather than call attention to their rule-breaking by appealing to cast members for help. Because the younger brother did not know how to swim, Delaurot tried to carry him on his back as he swam to shore. Bogden Delaurot went down about halfway across the river. The younger boy remained afloat by dogpaddling until a ride operator hauled him aboard a boat, but Bogden was nowhere to be found. His body was not located by searchers until the next morning.

7 June 1980: Gerardo Gonzales, a recent San Diego high school graduate, was killed on the People Mover in an accident much like the one that had befallen Ricky Lee Yama thirteen years earlier. Gonzales, in the early morning hours of a Grad Nite celebration, was climbing from car to car as the People Mover entered the SuperSpeed Tunnel adjacent to the former America Sings building. Gonzales stumbled and fell onto the track, where an oncoming train of cars crushed him beneath its wheels and dragged his body a few hundred feet before being stopped by a ride operator.

4 June 1983: Philip Straughan, an 18-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico, resident, also drowned in the Rivers of America in yet another Grad Nite incident. Straughan and a friend -- celebrating both their graduations and Straughan's eighteenth birthday -- had been drinking quite heavily that evening. They sneaked into a "Cast Members Only" area along the river and untied an inflatable rubber maintenance motorboat, deciding to take it for a joyride around the river. Unable to adequately control the boat, they struck a rock near Tom Sawyer Island, and Straughan was thrown into the water. His friend travelled back to shore to seek help, but Straughan drowned long before his body was finally located an hour later.

3 January 1984: Dolly Regene Young, a 48-year-old Fremont, CA, resident, was killed on the Matterhorn in an incident remarkably similar to the first Disneyland guest death nearly twenty years earlier. About two-thirds of the way down the mountain Young was thrown from her seat into the path of an oncoming bobsled, her head and chest becoming pinned beneath its wheels. An examination of Young's sled revealed that her seatbelt was not fastened at the time of the accident, but because she was riding alone in the rear car of a sled no one could determine whether or not she had deliberately unfastened her belt.

24 December 1998: In a tragic Christmas Eve accident, one Disneyland cast member and two guests were injured (one fatally) when a rope used to secure the sailing ship Columbia as it docked on the Rivers of America tore loose the metal cleat to which it was attached. The cleat sailed through air and struck the heads of two guests who were waiting to board the ship, Luan Phi Dawson, 33, of Duvall, Washington, and his wife, Lieu Thuy Vuong, 43. Dawson was declared brain dead two days later and died when his life support system was disconnected.
This accident resulted in the first guest death in Disneyland's history that was not attributable to any negligence on the part of the guest (it was the result of a combination of insufficiently rigorous ride maintenance and an insufficiently experienced supervisor's assuming an attraction operator's role) and prompted a movement for greater government oversight of theme park operations and safety procedures.

5 September 2003: A 22-year-old man, Marcelo Torres of Gardena, California, died, and several other guests were injured, when a locomotive separated from its train along a tunnel section of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Torres bled to death after suffering blunt force trauma of the chest.

yeah who the fuck thought "Celebration" would ever make a good name for a hospital??

for ages i thought that ride was called "People Mower" and thought bloody hell that is also an unfortunate name.

People take risks they think they understand--and then there's 4 year olds at Disney World.

DId this poor kid have a diagnosed or undiagnosed condition?

There's an actual town right next to Walt Disney World just off of U.S. Highway 192 called Celebration (a planned development by Disney that duplicates every notion of sentimental All-American pre-1960 nuclear family nostalgia -- combined with further Disneyfied cartoonish artifice -- and exploits it all in one town), and that's incidentally where the nearest hospital is.

and then there's 4 year olds at Disney World.

And then there's their moms. AND the stupid, stupid attendant who did not enforce the 44 in rule. 4yr olds are 2.5-3 feet tall. No where CLOSE to 44in.

(xposts)

I went to college with a kid from Celebration. Insufferable twat.

(This is a really horrifying story. I have a coworker who was recently on this ride and I'm afraid to discuss it with him due to the likelyhood of him freaking the fuck out.)

Oh. Ok.

I agree with that as far as that article goes at least. There's negligent parenting and negiligent parenting. I don't think this makes it, yet. Now, then there's this.

I suppose "Insufferable Twat" is a worse name for a town/hospital.

You can bet they did, Disney doesn't fuck around with that shit. Risk assessment would have never told them to check for a 4-y.o. that was 44 inches tall, unfortunately. That requirement is probably less arbitrary than requiring age, and much much quicker for the ride attendants to sort. Kids spend their whole lives wanting to be older, imagine if you started saying you had to be a certain age to go on rides. Kids don't have ID and I ain't taking birth certs to the amusement park.

It's not like this is the first time anybody's died at Disney. IIRC snopes.com has a pretty lengthy rundown.

Being seated in a dark theater in Florida with a group of brightly lit anamorphic robots singing in front of me as I hear the screams of a woman being crushed to death by a rotating wall ... is definitely nightmare fuel for me.

It's been a while since I've read it, but I remember it being ambivalent about the place.

Not to say Disney's not to blame. I wonder if the 4-year-old had some sort of condition, that maybe his mom wasn't aware of?

what language(s) were they in?

And the ride was great; it seemed more like an actual experience than a ride. I really felt like I was in a spaceship taking off (not that I really know what this would be like, obv, but it worked for me). It was physically intense, though: tears were running down my face by the time it was over, and I felt pretty weak. This didn't stop me, however, from riding it twice more.

Not suitable for 4-year-olds, though, clearly.

2 Gs is tiny. You're subjected to about 12 just jumping up and down, for godsakes.

-your resident ex-amusement employee/smartass

100s? In the amusement industry? Any park that would have percentages like that would be shut down far sooner. Furthermore, try actually reading the deaths: of the 10 listed, 7 were rider or guest misconduct. The first time Disney ever had a death due to a malfunction/error was the time the metal cleat came off the paddleboat in 1998. Since then, its only occurred once more with the collision on Big Thunder Mountain. You can't blame Disney for people being idiots and standing on rides or drunkenly attempting to swim across bodies of water.

I call bullshit. The average person will blackout at around 5 G's, and the space shuttle only reaches about 3 G's.

(Bet you aren't thinking about G-forces anymore. Wink wink. Sigh.)

You'll blackout at 5 G's sustained. Your body can withstand humongous G-loads, assuming they're for very short periods of time. Again, jumping up and down will create large g-loads (around 10-12). Jumping off the bottom stair in your house to the ground will be near 20 (depending on what shoes you wear and how straight your knees are). Racecar drivers have withstood impacts registering around 150 Gs and walked away. In this case, the g-load of Mission:Space (approximately 2.5) is less than that of the Rotor/Gravitron class rides that are found at carnivals, and the number of fatalities caused merely by riding those is impossibly small (so much so, I've never even heard of one in the 50 or so years they've operated), yet they have similar or shorter height requirements, and additionally have riders in "more strenuous positions" (in Rotor's case, standing upright with no floor beneath them).

There was another death, not in that list, where a 4 or 5 year old girl riding a simulator at Disney in EPCOT died, but that was later determined to be a pre-existing heart condition, which is almost certainly what this will be.

Also: people who've noted feeling dizzy on Mission: Space probably made the single biggest mistake possible. They turned their head to either side. Do that, and the illusion of forward movement disappears.

You actually can if they set up conditions where people, especially children, are likely to do something like that. Not drunken stuff for kiddies, but attractive nuisances can overpower some really dumb behavior.

Now this is a ride.

In 1954, Colonel John Paul Stapp Ph.D., M.D., a US Air Force flight surgeon and researcher, sustained the highest voluntary g-accelerations of 45 times gravity. This work was done to determine the design standards for safety harnesses and ejector seats being developed at the time to cope with the newest generation of supersonic jets. Dr. Stapp achieved this by riding a rocket sled to 634 miles per hour and accelerating to a halt in 1.4 seconds. This is the same force as crashing a car into a wall at 60 mph, but with ten times greater duration.

So is pretending that somehow kids are DOOMED if they're subjected to it. Like I said before: millions of kids have been on Gravitrons and lived. The vast, overwhelming majority. Hell, Texas Titan at Six Flags Over Texas pulls 4.5 SUSTAINED and no one there has died on it (unless you believe a 6 year old is somehow more capable of taking g-force like that than a 4 year old). The coasters and circulars on the German Fair circuit have a near perfect safety record, and eclipse even the above listed numbers.

Blame? No. Drunken idiots are drunken idiots. Standing up on rides is stupid. Sue? Sure.

I'd argue that rides that depend on detailed rider conduct ("look forward only")to avoid injury during stressful situations are per se too dangerous for four year olds.

Having someone wear a seatbelt that is mandatory for a ride, and having them remove it in mid ride and stand up (which is also against the rules) doesn't apply here. In fact, in Ohio it's against the law to defeat any restraint on an amusement attraction. I got a few people arrested for it while working at Cedar Point. It was actually really gratifying.

Looking forward won't kill or injure you. It would just throw off the body and probably make you nauseous. Big shock that a ride that spins in circles might do that, right?

Duh. It's the teacups!!!

xpost

Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh, let me take my chances on the Wall of Death

Those are Rotors. Chance (now Chance/Morgan) built tons and tons of them in the 50s and 60s. Most parks run a 42" height requirement and their minimum run speed is about 45RPM. Its about a 3G pull, typically in 60-90 second cycles. A lot of parks got rid of them in the 90s because of maintenance (Chance stopped creating parts for the rides, forcing parks and fair companies to go to third parties) and insurance (its a ride without restraints where you're up in the air attached to a wall by gravity) concerns. I know Lake Compounce in CT, the Western Washington State Fairgrounds, and Canobie Lake in New Hampshire still run them. Most show companies ditched theirs as they moved to Gravitrons (which do effectively the same thing, but fold up on a single trailer, and are therefore more economical).

This kind of ride, Hunter?

Haha, I went on this when I was a kid.

My favorite spinning ride ever...the immense Soriani And Moser Top Star Tour (of which, there's only 3-4 in existance):

http://www.flatrides.com/Ride%20Index/SorianiandMoserTopStarTour4.jpg

http://www.disneyorlandohotels.com/images/disney-all-star-sports-lg.jpg

http://www.wdw-photos.com/101503/assp1.jpg
http://www.lhs2006.com/seniortrip/allstarpool.jpg

That pic of yr favorite is so great, it feels woozy. Sure that kid in the right hand chair made the height limit?

I remember being so completely devastated at being to short by like half an inch to ride the Dragon Coaster at Rye Playland. It's like yesterday (ahem plus 27 years).

MD commentary on boingboing, following a link to this article.

http://image12.webshots.com/13/3/79/83/144937983sLqMrA_ph.jpg

http://hotels.about.com/library/photos/wdw_pop/playdoh.jpg

http://www.lhs2006.com/seniortrip/allstarbaseball.jpg

I stayed in the baseball part of the resort. I was there on a field trip when I was 12 (we were visiting MGM Animation Studios for a cartooning class at a gifted centre I went to once a week during elementary and middle school).

amen