Every year, millions of people ride and walk away happy from the Jersey Shore's boardwalk amusement rides and traveling carnivals.
But hundreds limp away - or are carried away - with injuries.
The Asbury Park (N.J.) Press reported its share of piecemeal injury stories. This summer, for the first time, we used computers to take a hard look at the injuries and at state oversight of the ride industry.
Hoping to produce a story for the start of summer, I asked the state Department of Labor in April for its database of amusement park injuries. The department first said records were not computerized. A month later, after officials sent us computer printouts, we pressed the issue. They admitted the records were indeed in a database, but said they could not make a copy. After another month of requests and delays, they finally delivered a set of disks.
Big old disks
There was a snag: the disks were 8.5 inches square, from a now-ancient IBM System 36 computer. For $123, a data-conversion service recommended by NICAR copied the data to 3.5-inch diskettes for us in fixed ASCII format.
The data files included a master table of all licensed rides, a table of all companies licensed to operate rides, and a table of their insurance companies. The mother lode was the table on accidents, containing 784 injuries from 1992 through the first week of June 1995. Details included injury dates, ride names, ride type, riders' names and age ranges, and what caused the injury.
The database was limited, though. For one thing, it did not specifically describe riders' injuries. There were fields identifying which part of the body was injured (head, neck, trunk, upper, lower, and multi). But that made a muscle strain indistinguishable from a broken neck. It did not explain how the accident happened, or tell what if any regulatory action was taken against the ride owner.
There was also a statistical limitation. Because parks do not report ridership figures to any agency, and many guard the figures jealously, it was impossible to calculate how many people were injured for every 1,000 who went on a ride.
Back to paper records
That left us unable to definitively compare big and small amusement parks or carnivals. The data needed to be augmented and cleaned up a great deal. With a notebook PC, I spent 10 hours during two days in state offices reviewing paper records on each accident and typing in the actual injuries, what happened, and whether state inspectors took any action.
Back in the newsroom, I added new fields and standardized the wildly varying ride names (such as Go Karts, Go-Karts, Go Carts, Go-Carts) in order to get meaningful queries. I could not anticipate all the names that a park might give go carts or certain other rides, though, so our injury totals for them were probably low. I analyzed the data in FoxPro for Windows.
I fleshed out the data by interviewing injured riders, ride owners, lawyers for riders and for parks, engineering professors, state regulators, and insurance underwriters. That included an incident where one hospital worker dubbed the popular Action Park as "Traction Park."
To find accidents that had not been reported to the state, I checked court records. I used corporate and court records to background a water slide designer whose creations are in theme parks all over the United States, and who has been sued repeatedly.
A ride well worth it
The fight with state officials and the work needed to clean the database meant the story was not finished until the end of summer.
Among the conclusions:
State officials for years have minimized injuries as minor bumps and bruises. Their database classified 774 of 784 injuries over three years "not serious." But a closer look at accident records showed the "not serious" injuries included broken bones, concussions, and serious cuts.
There may have been more than the 1,000 accidents reported since 1991, since some ride owners, especially traveling carnivals, don't report everything to the state.
Asked about accidents, ride owners routinely whine about rider horseplay. But state investigators attributed only 6 percent of injuries to riders' misbehavior.
An understaffed, underfunded team of state inspectors cut from 17 to nine over five years shrugged or struck out again and again trying to figure out why certain accidents happened. They rarely fined parks, and when they did, the fines were minimal.
Rick Linsk can be reached at (908) 922-6000, extension 4360, or send e-mail to linsk@usa.net.