Roller coaster thrills, spills surge.

The news reports interrupt summer's carefree lull:

* A mother and her child hurtled from a roller coaster at Gillian's Wonderland Pier in Ocean City, New Jersey, when its brakes fail;

* Ride passengers stranded 35 feet in the air after two roller coasters derail at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Missouri;

* A man pitched to his death after he shimmies out of a roller coaster safety harness at Paramount's Kings Dominion in Doswell, Virginia.

The media aren't reporting just a good run of bad luck. Roller coaster-related injuries and deaths are on the rise. Six people died in amusement park accidents during the summer of 1999. Four were killed in just one week. Adventure seekers have turned to roller coasters for fast, gravity-defying thrills since the 1920s when wooden coasters picked up speed and clackety-clacked around rickety tracks at speeds of 65 mph--slow by today's standards. Why the current high in injuries and deaths?

Amusement parks are in what those in the industry call an "arms race." To stand out from the competition, amusement park owners challenge each other to build the fastest, the tallest, the loopiest coasters.

But the thrills aren't without spills. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), about 4,000 theme park accidents occur each year. The agency has reported that since 1994, accidents at parks have increased 24 percent, and trips to the emergency room for treatment of injuries suffered at the parks have grown by 87 percent.

Serious roller coaster accidents, though rare, garner media attention. But the surge in injuries is mainly due to lower-profile accidents caused by the wilder ride that modern coasters give passengers, which sometimes results in non-life-threatening injuries like bruises, strained muscles, and herniated disks.

Speed alone isn't the issue. "The real danger isn't when a coaster is flying down a long ramp," said Howard Nations, an attorney who practices law in Houston. "The real danger is when the coaster makes a sharp turn. The g-forces"--the pull on the body exerted by gravity as a roller coaster climbs and plummets, twists and halts--"are just tremendous." Nations won damages for a 16-year-old boy who suffered a stroke while riding the Texas Cyclone at Six Flag's AstroWorld in Houston. The boy's head and neck were subjected to forces of 26 g--enough to tear an artery in his neck. (Gonzalez v. AstroWorld, No. 85-84362 (Tex., Harris County Dist. Ct. 1989).)

A body at rest is under forces of 1 g. When coasters change direction suddenly or round a curve at high speed, riders can be subjected to forces that can reach as much as 4 or 5 g. Fighter pilots typically experience forces of 7 to 8 g in tight turns.

The CPSC says the physiological effects riders experience at forces in excess of 1 g include dizziness and loss of balance; blurred vision (due to pooling of blood in the brain and eyes); temporary blindness; loss of peripheral vision; and loss of consciousness (due to pooling of blood in the legs). Loss of consciousness, the agency says, is typically experienced in response to sustained exposure to forces in excess of 3 to 5g.

Coasters' abrupt accelerations and decelerations could result in bone and connective tissue injuries, according to the CPSC. Where the body is restrained but the head is free to pivot, the agency says that whiplash-like injuries, cervical fractures and dislocations, and concussions are common. If riders' heads are perpendicular to the direction of travel at the onset of force, they are at risk of significant closed head injuries that can result in concussion or coma. And rides with excessive g-forces can cause ruptured blood vessels elsewhere in the body, torn or detached retinas, lower back injuries, and death.

William Avery, head of an Orlando, Florida, ride-safety consulting firm, said that roller coaster engineers need to consider how speed and force interact. "Faster speed doesn't mean greater force. But speed can affect force," he said. "If you are traveling on a straightaway in an automobile at 110 mph, you'll feel little force. But if the automobile makes an extreme right turn at 110 mph, you'll feel a lot of force. It's the same with a roller coaster. If a roller coaster traveling at 45 mph banks abruptly, riders will feel extreme force."

So is the coaster industry ignoring the dangers of high speeds when mixed with high g-forces? "Not in a broad-brush statement, no," said Avery. "As rides have gotten more sophisticated, so, too, have safety features. The danger is when the industry tries to put all the features of a ride --inversions, corkscrew loops, boomerang runs, and camelback humps--in too small a space. Turns are typically tighter and loops are quicker in a compact space, and there will be some jostling.

"There are some isolated cases where the safety envelope has been pushed," he said. "A ride here and a ride there may have maintenance problems or ride operators who may be neglectful. Statistically, coasters have an excellent safety record overall. There's cause for alarm if a ride looks to be in bad shape. That's a red flag, because what about the parts of the ride that you can't see?"

Haphazard regulation

According to U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who made public in May the findings of a report documenting cases of brain injury suffered by riders of roller coasters and similar amusement park rides, "No government body at any level is responsible for setting limits on how high g-forces should be allowed to rise on roller coasters." Markey has proposed a bill that, if signed into law, would allow federal oversight of theme park rides.

Although most states conduct safety inspections to ensure that amusement park rides are in good mechanical shape, no state regulates ride intensity. At least a dozen states do not require theme parks to report injuries suffered on rides. In states that do require parks to report injuries, many spinal injuries and connective tissue injuries--even those requiring hospitalization and surgery--often go unreported if visitors seek medical help only after they leave the park.

In fact, rides at amusement parks are one of the few consumer products in the United States that the CPSC does not regulate. The agency occasionally issues ride safety alerts, but it has no regulatory power.

The report Markey publicized in May was prepared at his request by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. It includes 15 case studies since 1979 that involve riders of all ages who have stepped off roller coasters or other amusement park rides with internal cranial bleeding and other symptoms of traumatic brain injury. Fourteen of the 15 cases are clustered in the 1990s, and 13 occurred in just the five-year span from 1994 to 1999. In some cases, surgery was necessary to remove blood clots in the brain or to prevent life-threatening complications.

"The NINDS report is the first comprehensive effort to assemble what is known about the impact of the sometimes-violent forces experienced during amusement park rides," said Markey. "It is startling to see the cluster of reports that have sprung up between 1994 and 1999, coinciding with a period of rapid growth in roller coaster construction and the increasing use of steel technology to build higher, faster, multiple-inversion roller coasters. It appears that technology and commercial pressures are combining in a way that could threaten serious health consequences if the problem remains unaddressed."

On its Web site, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) says that "the latest statistics estimate that more people were injured in 1998 while fishing (77,643), dancing (38,427), golfing (46,019), and bicycling (597,284) than were injured on ... amusement rides of all types." And the association notes that, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 141 people were killed by air bags from 1990 to 1999--more than 7 times the number of fatalities on amusement rides during the same period. Most injuries, IAAPA says, are due to rider error, such as horseplay and disregard for safety guidelines.

Markey criticizes the industry for its "Alice in Wonderland" view of its safety record. At a press conference in April, where he was joined by Ann Brown, chair of the CPSC, he compared the fatality rate on roller coasters to that for other vehicles. The fatality rate on coasters was not as bad as for passenger cars, but worse than for trains, buses, and planes.

"When a child dies in a train or plane crash," he said, "federal safety experts fly to the scene, reconstruct the accident, share the information in all 50 states, and order repairs. But when an eight-year-old dies on a roller coaster, the CPSC's hands are tied, and no one in the federal government is empowered to investigate. Accidents are occurring, and people are getting injured unnecessarily. That's wrong. The law must be changed."

If Markey's proposed bill, which is currently under review by a congressional committee, is approved, it would allow the CPSC to investigate deaths or serious injuries on roller coasters and other amusement park rides; authorize the agency to share accident information with all 50 states; and let the commission order corrective action when it learns of a safety hazard and fine ride operators, manufacturers, and designers who refuse to comply with the orders.

Ride-safety expert Avery agrees that national standards for amusement park rides should be adopted and that accident information should be shared among the states. "The ride industry can't start solving problems with rides until it knows what all the problems are," he said. By setting the CPSC up as a clearinghouse for ride accident information, data can be used to prevent similar accidents on coasters in different states.

Litigation twists and turns

Handling a case involving roller coaster-related injury or death is no walk in the park. "These cases are labor intensive," said Barry Novack, an attorney in Beverly Hills, California, who has handled a number of theme park injury cases.

"Plaintiff lawyers are always confronted with the fact of sheer numbers," said Nations, the Houston attorney. "The theme park will state that millions of people have ridden the coaster and that none of them suffered the injury your client suffered."

The first time an injury on a particular ride occurs, plaintiff lawyers are often faced with the "plaintiff anomaly" defense. "The defense will claim that there is some anomaly within the plaintiff"--a degenerative bone disorder, for example--"that caused him or her to react to the ride as he or she did," Nations said.

Novack is working on a case with forensic pathologist Claus Speth of Wenonah, New Jersey, who has found that some people are predisposed to developing aneurysms from the "impulsive dynamic loading" that aggressive amusement rides produce. Speth says up to 9 percent of the population may be at risk.

The other standard defense is that the plaintiff did something--reached out of the car while it was moving or tampered with a safety harness, for example--to cause the injury.

As if those challenges weren't enough for plaintiff lawyers to overcome, plaintiffs in some states encounter the risk doctrine. "An often-quoted line from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo says it all," Nations said. "`The timorous may stay at home.' Basically, riders place themselves on a roller coaster at their own risk. They assume the risk of injury. No recovery is available in a substantial number of cases."

So how did Nations convince jurors in the case of the 16-year-old boy who suffered a stroke on the Texas Cyclone? "Our case was the first [roller coaster case] in the nation to use computer-generated graphics. The graphics won the trial," he said.

"The problem with the Texas Cyclone was the seat backs reached only the bottom of my client's shoulder blades. The only safety restraint was a lap bar. The bar locked the lower body in place but allowed the upper body to whip around like a flag in the breeze. That proved to be more dangerous than not being anchored at all," Nations said.

Nations's computer-generated replica of the coaster "showed the g-forces at the exact point where our client suffered his injury." And that clinched the case for the plaintiff.

Novack cautions plaintiff lawyers about accepting theme park injury cases. "Your client should be sympathetic. His or her actions should not have contributed to the injury, and he or she should not have had a known preexisting condition that may have contributed to the injury. And you should take a case only if the client suffered major injuries," he said. "You don't want to take a case unless it warrants the expenditure of time and money. The battle to fight these cases is tremendous."