I enjoy riding water slides as much as I enjoy roller coasters. So it was a must for me to visit water parks in summer vacation. But as I always went on the water slides, I’ve wondered if the safety related facilities were actually safe enough and if the nets hung around the slides could actually be able to hold the weight of a fully grown adult if one fell or was thrown to it. Roller coaster accidents is a unfortunately an incident that occurs yearly. But in my point of view, water slide accidents didn’t happen as often as roller coasters.
Unluckily, there happened to be a disastrous incident that happened in USA. On the 7th of August, a boy was killed by a fatal neck injury during a water slide ride.
He had visited the Schlitterbahn Water Park, located in Kansas. He had gone on a water slide called Verruckt which was famous for it’s height and was even recorded in the Guiness book for it. Although the peak of the water slide reaches the height of 51m, it only takes about 11 seconds to slide down because of the gradient which is near to vertical. Because of this, it was name Verruckt, named after the German word meant for ‘insane’.
But the problem was that since rider had to be capable of his own safety and for the tube to be kept from flipping over the during the ride, there are age, height, and weight limits which the boy didn’t meet in either of them. His rubber boat crashed into the wire fence surrounding the water slide and he fell out the slide.
The waterslide has been currently stopped running and will be until the investigation for this boy’s death is over.
The slide’s open was postponed a few times before it first opened in 2014. At that time, the water park had not revealed the reason for why the open was delayed but it was later said that it was because of a problem with the conveyor belt system which was used to drag up the tubes used for the slide from the ground level.
ABC NEWS has reported that when the designers and architectures for the slide has taken sand sacs on the ride as an experiment, few of them had bounded of the slide.
Toppo, Greg “Boy dies on Kansas waterslide billed as world’s tallest” USA TODAY. 8 August 2016
photo credit : http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/08/07/boy-dies-kansas-waterslide/88373128/
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