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.
Holy shit. This is some Action Park [1] level irresponsibility here.
A few other horrifying details:
* Riders were restrained by Velcro straps. These frequently came loose. One rider broke several toes after his restraint came undone during a ride, forcing him to dig his feet into the corners of the raft.
* The brake system on the ride was completely nonfunctional when the boy was killed, and had been that way for several weeks. Evidence suggests that the park planned to delay maintenance until the park closed for the season.
My dad rode a cliffhanger type of slide at Action Park in the mid 80s. It had a plastic covering about 1/2 way down so you couldn't "fall off" the slide.
I'm still amazed to this day he did it because he's afraid of heights. It was easily 50' high. Fortunately, the only downside was it was like getting an enormous enema.
Those sled things that went down the concrete track, everyone has scars from those. Great memories but not remotely safe.
Great Adventure (Six Flags) wasn't as much fun but we all came back in one piece.
>Great Adventure (Six Flags) wasn't as much fun but we all came back in one piece.
Central Jersey dude here. Yeah I did the Action Park alpine slide. And saw that water slide your dad mentioned (I opted for the smaller one).
But not everybody was so lucky at GA. I was there the day a girl died falling off Lightning Loops. And the family with us also happened to be there previously the day a fire broke out in the Haunted House, killing several people.
In high school I volunteered at the local hospital. One of the patients was the guy who stood up on Scream Machine to impress his girlfriend and fell out.
Fond memories of childhood visits to a local "flume" ride, essentially a long concrete-lined ditch dug in a switchback pattern down a big hillside. Painted to make it slick, and they pumped a continuous stream of water all along it. You rode it by sitting or lying on foam mats, about 3x4 feet in size.
A ton of fun, you could get going pretty fast and you definitely wanted to have your legs crossed when you hit the pool at the bottom. Never heard of anyone getting hurt though, other than some mild abrasions if you slipped off the mat -- the concrete wasn't totally smooth. The curves were pretty steeply banked and the most you could really do if you went over the side was end up in underbrush.
Terrible that adults who should know better are making rides without apparent regard for safety of the (mostly) kids that will be riding them. Those elevated trough rides do worry me, they really need to be fully enclosed anywhere there is any chance of going airborne or over the edge.
Hmm… The indictment mentions that normal engineering practice would include an “upstop”, which is apparently a wheel or other part of the vehicle that rides under the track [1] to prevent it from going airborne. In addition, it says the restraint should have been a “Class 5 restraint consisting of rigid overhead shoulder bars with a locking lap restraint”, which would effectively prevent the rider from going airborne. So it seems like if both of those things had been present, designed properly, and of course tested and maintained, that would provide a high degree of safety without needing to fully enclose the track.
I have memories myself of a summer camp with a nice long slide that was waxed with the insides of McDonalds cups. You rode down on a burlap sack and if for some reason you touched the slide itself you would get a gigantic friction burn (ask me how I know!).
My dad recalls one summer where three people died on coasters and another incident where someone lit a (very unsafe as per fire code) haunted house on fire.
It's gotten considerably better since then though when I stopped going they were in the middle of a serious nickel-and-diming phase.
Even more damning on the brake system was that the operators initially claimed to investigators that the brake system was only in place during testing. They had to find a visitor's GoPro footage to prove that the brake system was supposed to be there, but was missing.
The Dollop podcast had an excellent episode detailing the history of Action Park (infused with their normal humor/horror reparte) - http://thedollop.net/wp/episode-87-dollop/
> 61. In response to the Groves incident, MILES intercepted the incident reports which the lifeguards had written. MILES destroyed these written witness statements. MILES then forced the lifeguards to write coached statements which omitted any detail of how the injury had occurred. MILES then ordered the medical staff to alter their medical reports.
edit: The owner was arrested just today, so I had missed that.
Can someone explain why they are charging the 29 year old director of operations who started as a lifeguard and had no formal training or connection to engineering/design and not one of the designers or owners, both of which are mentioned in the indictment multiple times?
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than they needed to charge someone.
As others have noted, there has been another arrest. The operations director was merely the first. So, the question then becomes why him first?
According to the article:
> As investigators were looking into the death of the boy, Caleb Schwab, in August 2016, Mr. Miles, then the operations director, hid or destroyed documents detailing injuries sustained by riders, the indictment said.
I'd guess that this might have something to do with it. Even if it turns out that no one did anything actually criminal in regards to the building and operation of the ride itself, destroying evidence to impede an investigation is criminal. The criminal charges for this are probably also easier to prove than the ones related to the ride itself.
Furthermore, even if it turns out there was nothing actually criminal in the operation of the ride, so that none of the owners or designers are guilty of anything, he can still go down for destroying evidence.
In short...he's potentially double screwed. So indict him first, point out that even if he gets off on the ride-related charges (which is plausible...he can try to argue that he is not an engineer, so he trusted the judgment of the engineers who designed and built the thing), they've got him on the destroying evidence thing. His only realistic hope, therefore, is to accept a deal. Tell him you really want to nail the owners and designers, and offer him a deal.
The owner was just arrested as well,[1] and I'd bet that more will follow. My guess is the director of operations will get a plea deal in exchange for testifying against the others.
Yeah typically the defendant they want to testify (often the lowest-level, least-responsible defendant) is charged first. In exchange for a deal, that person will provide as much evidence as possible against everyone else.
It is interesting that this firm has an "owner" rather than a CEO and a board. It's my impression that executives and board members would be less likely to face criminal charges in this sort of situation.
I think its likely that its an easier case to prove, but they are charging him with some things that take quite a high bar to prove.
For instance, the involuntary manslaughter charge is going to be hard to proof when the evidence that he was planning on going on the ride the same day is presented. They have to prove recklessness which includes proving the person knew their actions were likely to cause harm.
Also worth noting they are basically throwing the book at him with the number and severity of charges on the indictment.
> For instance, the involuntary manslaughter charge is going to be hard to proof when the evidence that he was planning on going on the ride the same day is presented.
Often the safety of something for a particular person depends on their knowledge of the danger. For example there is a board that is failing on my deck. It is possible that it could give way leading to someone twisting their ankle or even breaking a bone. Yet I walk on my deck everyday--because I know to avoid stepping on that board until I get around to learning how to fix it and doing so.
Maybe he knew the places where it was more dangerous than well designed and built similar rides, and what to do or not do at those places to minimize the risk?
> For instance, the involuntary manslaughter charge is going to be hard to proof when the evidence that he was planning on going on the ride the same day is presented. They have to prove recklessness which includes proving the person knew their actions were likely to cause harm.
Surf instructor sends novice who has never surfed before out to surf Teahupoo. In his defense, the instructor was planning on surfing it the same day.
Yep, being aware that people with low body weight were more likely to report incidents could give you confidence to ride knowing you had high body weight.
"For instance, the involuntary manslaughter charge is going to be hard to proof when the evidence that he was planning on going on the ride the same day is presented. "
I'm pretty sure you can get involuntary manslaughter for driving recklessly, crashing your car, and killing your passenger. Or failing to maintain your car properly, crashing it due to an avoidable failure, and killing your passenger.
If I'm correct and you can get inv. manslaughter when you're in the same vehicle as the victim, it shouldn't be too hard to prove when the person was only planning to be in the ride later.
The legal definition of recklessness requires that the person know (or should know) that the ride is dangerous. Legally, it is more difficult to prove when that person took actions that suggest they did not think it was dangerous.
To your point about broken safety features:
One could potentially even argue that the brake isn't a safety feature. It could be there to help riders that are scared of going too fast to more easily control their speed, simply for their own enjoyment. I don't think that use of the brake would be required under normal operations and therefore, it could be argued that the brake wasn't a safety feature. I personally don't think it makes sense that a "safety" feature is optional and relies on the rider, but I could be wrong. The designers were certainly negligent in other ways....
Not sure if that follows or if it makes any more sense to you, but legally, its a potential argument.
AFAICT, the “brake” was a rough pad attached to the surface of the slide, designed to slow the raft as it crested a hill. It wasn’t a user-operable brake. See page 4 of the indictment.
>I personally don't think it makes sense that a "safety" feature is optional and relies on the rider, but I could be wrong.
While in general safety features can require a competent user, e.g. the brakes in your car, in the case of amusement park rides that allow children that does indeed not make sense.
But... I would argue that this is just evidence of substandard design of the speed control system. There is ample evidence of a history of injuries due to excessive speed.
This is true, but I wish they did not overcharge to scare defendants into pleading guilty to lesser charges. Sometimes prosecutors go way overboard with this approach (think of Aaron Swartz). I don't see why the courts allow this practice.
How on earth have I missed that encapsulation of a conservatism that is a good balance for liberalism (or progessivism)? When you can explain what that rule might have been good for, you can seriously discuss changing it.
That's what kills me about GOP deregulation. It's purely profit driven, without concern for actual effects. I'm okay with improving regulations. But that take time and effort and isn't amenable to the reckless clearcutting approach.
+1, definitely well worth reading. Paragraphs 85-89 seem like they come out of a prize-winning thriller, but every single paragraph in the indictment is also gripping.
Society has moved into a dangerous position of rewarding people for extreme risk taking, so long as it pans out. I'm not saying this guy wasn't responsible. He totally was, but things like this are going to keep happening the more we encourage disastrous risks.
They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards for cars. There's a great 99% Invisible episode about the shift from believing injury from car accidents was unavoidable/the fault of the driver to making cars safer in impacts:
Stories like this seem to be a step backwards. Regulation can sometimes hinder some industry (usually when one industry lobbies for it to keep competitors), but it also has an incredible track record of making things safer.
The solution is not stop encouraging people to take extreme risks, it's to stop encouraging them to take risk that put others, and not them, at risk (and punish them if they do so).
All of the great services and products we use today came from extreme risk taking, it's the corner stone of entrepreneurship.
> Society has moved into a dangerous position [...]
> They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards [...]
Maybe it's seen a bit of a resurgence recently, but history (and the attendant selection bias) has always rewarded risk-takers whose risks paid off, while letting the rest die off-screen.
At the most basic level you have the people doing risky stunts for YouTube, etc, and getting killed. Like the woman who shot her boyfriend in the chest with a Desert Eagle, at his insistence, because he thought an encyclopedia volume would protect him.
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'.
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.
Poor choice of example. "Electrical boards", aka PCBs, have a lot of safety requirements, and poorly designed ones are often implicated in electrical and battery fires.
Fair enough, I had trouble coming up with concrete examples. I do think there are plenty of engineering situations where safety isn't a major concern though.
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-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?..
> [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.
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.
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.
I'd think most amusement park / fair ride fatalities are due to maintenance problems.
I can see that being difficult to oversee, especially with the mobile fairs that pack up the rides and move to another town. Check a ride in one town, and maybe on the way to the next town the truck hits a big pothole and something breaks on the tilt-a-whirl.
But checking a new ride's engineering and design and construction ought to be possible, just like checking that a building is up to code.
Of course, this is self-harming Kansas, so amusement rides are probably checked by a poultry inspector, one day each month.
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."
"Most" might be true but it certainly doesn't apply to all. Uber's self driving car recently killed someone and there are plenty of indirect examples of deaths like the reported suicides after Mt Gox collapsed. Either way, "it isn't going to kill anyone" shouldn't be an excuse for ignoring the law or reasons for why that law might have been created in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
Yes NASCAR and IndyCar oval tracks have catch fences around a at least part of the tracks. These are for the safety of the fans, not the drivers. Crashing into the fence will shred the car. This is how Dan Wheldon died.
Not to mention that both series design cars to avoid going airborne or rolling as much as possible (the fenders on the DW12 IndyCars, the arrestor flaps on stock car roofs).
Alternative would be a different track layout. Universal opened Volcano Bay last year with an aqua coaster where it's pretty much impossible for the raft to come up because it, surprise, uses upstops to prevent it from going airborne.
The difference, of course, is that the netting in the image on that page pretty obviously isn't meant to catch people. It's more likely there to keep birds out or to keep somebody's phone or hat from shooting across the park at high speeds, or just to keep idiots from intentionally climbing out of the tube while it's elevated.
It is pretty normal to have netting underneath things like inverted rollercoasters, since people inevitably drop things... Not netting where people could collide with it.
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.
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.
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.
I rubber-necked and looked that up. In the case you're referring to the husband convinced his wife to shoot a book while he held it in front of his chest, believing it would stop the bullet. He set up two cameras to film it. So yes, this is arguably also poor engineering, but it would be more similar if the slide designer had been accidentally killed by the 10-year-old boy after convincing the boy to launch him down the slide.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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".
> 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-...