14-year old boy falls from a 430 foot theme park ride...

It must have been 2 weeks ago when the news came through about a teenage boy falling from a ride. Honestly, I skipped over the story. What went through my mind was a thin runt of a kid (like the young Tom Hanks in the movie BIG) who was too short to get on the ride and somehow they let him pass.
As usual, as more details surface, the story intensifies.
This 14-year old 'boy' was 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 340 pounds.
In metric that's 195.58cm and 154.22kg.
For comparison, that makes him significantly larger than the average man!

That FreeFall ride has a maximum weight of of 287 pounds, making the boy 53 pounds over the limit and a forensic investigator has been hired to understand what happened.
(I think I already know what happened)

This story won't be over any time soon... I expect the next article to describe a team of attorneys... from both sides!

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Comments (3)

There weren't any seatbelts on that ride. The fact that he was over the weight limit for the ride the lawsuit will include the company who owns the ride plus the attendant who didn't check to see how much the boy weighed will all be sued.

The boy had many years ahead that he could have earned a living. That will be taken into account when a settlement is offered.


If you look at a picture of this "Boy" who weighed over 300 lbs and at the picture of the restraints used on this ride, it becomes obvious that there's no way the restraint could have been closed enough to lock it into place due to size of the rider allowing the "boy" to slip right under the restraint as it went back up thus "releasing" him as he slid out of his seat and fell to the ground. The ride should have had a "failsafe" mechanism in place preventing it from moving unless every restraint was totally locked into place and if even 1 restraint was unsecured the circuit would have been open the ride would have been prevented from moving. To me this was a design failure of the ride which could have been prevented. I'm not surprised that this tragedy eventually happened given the apparent absence of such a "failsafe" mechanism. The addition of a "Microswitch" at every seat which would complete a circuit that allowed the ride to function would have prevented the ride from operating if each and every seat wasn't secured with or without a rider and "electrically" closed.
Sadly, someone has to die before they design a system that's (nearly) foolproof.
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created Apr 2022
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