The Truth of Amusement Parks?- Soleil

     
   Roller coasters and amusements parks are supposed to be getting safer with the technological advancements being made by today’s society, but are they getting deadlier? This situation is being tested, two years after a child was decapitated on the world's tallest water slide in Kansas, investigators revealed this week that they found design flaws and unreported injuries at the site. The death of 10-year-old Caleb Schwab and the the indictment of several people in the case has put a spotlight on amusement park safety. While the amusement park industry says its facilities are safe, just how often do accidents happen and what kind of safety is there? 
Thousands of injuries happen every year  In 2016, emergency rooms saw 30,900 injuries associated with amusement attractions nationwide, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That number includes rides for both mobile and fixed-site parks. “Fixed-site parks refer to permanent locations such as Disney and Six Flags while mobile parks move from one location to the next. The commission said it's aware of 22 deaths nationwide associated with amusement attractions since 2010. That number excludes fatalities at water parks or water slides, such as the 2016 death of Caleb Schwab in Kansas.” But in the 1980s, Congress revoked that authority for fixed-site parks (such as Disney and Six Flags theme parks), allowing them to be under state or local government control. It kept federal regulation in place for mobile carnivals. For fixed-site amusement parks, there is not one body nationally that oversees regulation -- instead that is left to state and local governments. "Currently 44 of 50 states regulate amusement parks. The six without state oversight are Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah. These states contain few, if any amusement parks," the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions says on its website. Amusement parks are so loosely regulated in some states, Six Flags was in charge of its own investigation in the 2013 death of a woman in its facility… No tea, no shade…
On top of that- "Many parents either assume that the rides at amusement parks are safe and that they're being inspected, or they don't even stop to think about how safe they might be," Mehan said last year. "So we want parents to learn in their state how rides are being inspected, by whom, and how often, so they can make the decision for themselves whether or not they want to take that risk before they go on the ride." 
I personally find this disheartening as I love roller coasters, but I am going to learn to be more cautious, as this connects to the 50s and 60s when automobiles were becoming a huge trend (even causing flight to the suburban areas of the south), but these cars still were dangerous, and taking lives. Although time has passed, fun pastimes can still turn into dangerous events, with a single mishap.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/health/amusement-park-incidents/index.html