Extremely preventable if not for classic :ancap-good: attitude
Former Schlitterbahn worker. I worked at another location years after this, but thought I could provide some insight.
Schlitterbahn is almost entirely reliant on minimum wage teenage workers. Work hours could get pretty long. Most shifts were double shifts, about 13-14 hours long. It was pretty much always over 40 hours a week. One summer we had an especially bad manager and got over 70 hours in one week. During orientation, we were told we didn't need to be paid extra for overtime because we were all seasonal workers. I'm not sure if that's true. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't actually know. There were constant rumors of wage theft. I only know directly of one incident, caused mainly by lazyness, which they did eventually fix after everyone complained for months. As a result of that, I actually had managers telling me not to come back for another summer.
I talked to someone who had worked in the gift shops during this incident. Most Schlitterbahn merchandise is just generic garbage. I've seen a lot of it in gift shops in Mexico. Sometimes the only thing identifying it as Schlitterbahn souvineer is a literal sticker or piece of tape with the name printed on it. There are some Schlitterbahn specific stuff, like T-shirts and picture frames. However, these are not park-specific. This meant that even though they were at a different Schlitterbahn park, they had merchandise depicting the Kansas City slide that had just killed someone. So they had to go through the store and remove that stuff.
Given the standards of professionalism, I'm honestly not suprised this type of thing happened. Luckily we didn't have anything quite this dangerous, but I'm not sure why they trust teenagers to enforce rules meant to save people's lives. I suppose that's every waterpark though.
They also have a lady who's job is to monitor every mention on Schlitterbahn anywhere on the internet. Apparently they have a software able to monitor the entire internet and detect any mention of their name? They may have made that up. If not: Hello lady! I forgot your name.
Disclaimer: they apparently got bought out after I left, so some of this may have changed.
Given the standards of professionalism
I remember hearing about it when it happened, but I figured it was sort of a freak engineering accident from a flawed design that slipped through the cracks. Obviously it was just a backyard waterslide project with a budget which is terrifying. It's also another case of libertarians creating their ideal environment which then teaches them why regulations exist in the first place (also see: Bitcoin).
but I’m not sure why they trust teenagers to enforce rules meant to save people’s lives.
They don't "trust" the teenagers per se. They just did the math that the savings in wages by hiring teens who don't have families to support (and presumably willing to work for less) more than offsets the potential costs of more lawsuits. Or just that the lower wages are "real" while a lawsuit is only a potential expense.
It's frustrating that YouTube doesn't require a sign-in age verification for this, but videos that debunk US propaganda, even without any gore at all, seem to get content restricted right away.
My apologies comrade, you're correct that I should have been more clear. I usually am more cognizant of these things.
If it makes a difference, IIRC it was the son of a senator who probably would have grown up to kill the sort of regulations that stop this thing from happening.
Children getting decapitated is bad, but it's less bad when the child would have gone on to become a puppet of a the bourgeois, like Anesthesia.
Damn, they really gotta bring back down votes.
"I'm pretty sure this child would've done bad stuff eventually, better to kill him now just in case."
Disgusting.
nevermind the downvote, where's the permaban button
How does Roz have such powerful 50-year-old-plumber energy yet he's just some dude in his twenties.
More from the wiki article:
A real recipe for success from the very start:
The water slide was conceived on the spur of the moment by Henry, after a team from Travel Channel's Xtreme Waterparks asked at a trade show what he was working on. After initial attempts to pitch the idea to vendors at the show failed, Henry decided to build the slide himself, enlisting John Schooley as the ride's lead designer. Henry had described the new ride to the Travel Channel crew as a "speed blaster", a term he had likewise improvised. He and Schooley knew that Schlitterbahn had to live up to the hype Henry had created and design something previously unheard of. Basically we were crazy enough to try anything, Schooley later recalled.
Henry pressed his design team to complete the ride at a faster pace than usual; many of those involved worked almost around the clock. Calculations that were normally allotted three to six months instead had five weeks to be completed. As they began testing, rafts kept going airborne on the ride's large bottom hump.
Who could have seen this coming?
An unnamed lifeguard at the park told Esquire in 2019 that he saw some of the later tests, which the park primarily did after it had closed for the day, with only select employees – usually those who had been with the company for the longest – allowed to watch. In his case, he saw the Xtreme Waterparks crew ride the ride. "The only time I saw the slide run successfully was on the Travel Channel episode,[a] but I wouldn't even call that successful", he recalled, since the raft in that case got stuck on the second hump. Sandbags on the raft frequently went airborne at that point as well; some viral videos of this leaked out. "I told my friends and family it was only a matter of time until someone died on Verrückt", the lifeguard said.
A safety consultant hired by the park shortly before Verrückt's scheduled opening told Henry it was unfinished and unsafe. When complete, he recommended that only riders 16 and over be allowed on the ride. Henry, who had no formal training in engineering, decided 14 was better. Right before the opening, however, he dropped any age limit.
The same survivorship bias that pervades so much of the US (now super obvious with covid spreading:
The riders who had seen the videos of 110-pound (50 kg) sandbags flying off the rafts went on anyway—one local judge told Esquire later that she rode the water slide ten times that day, and an employee who had loaded the sandbags during testing said he went down twenty times over its first two days. "That should tell you something about how I felt about it", he said.
Being a well-studied psychological phenomenon, it's not uniquely American, but definitely something that people should be learning about.
There's also this terrifying stuff when you go to a water park to have a good time and be mostly unconcerned with your safety (don't get drunk and don't run on the pavement and you should be just fine):
However, at least thirteen riders suffered non-fatal injuries, such as concussions or slipped and herniated discs – many of which had longterm effects – after either hitting the netting or being thrown into it. After a Missouri man thrown from the raft suffered facial injuries in June 2016, the park's operations manager allegedly attempted to cover up the incident, telling lifeguards what to write in their reports; it is believed that was not the only accident where this happened.
Even some riders who were uninjured were unnerved by Verrückt. A Kansas City man who had made a point of going down it due to favorable experiences with the Texas Schlitterbahn parks recalled having to grab the raft's auxiliary straps when the Velcro ones holding him came loose after the first drop; he was thankful that his son had used the weight limit as an excuse not to ride A local woman whose boyfriend held her in the raft likewise noted to Esquire that the netting and hoops on the lower hump showed signs of many instances where people had collided with it.
shit is fucked up, it was like a state politician's kid that died right
gives one some ideas for the wonders to come in Central Park though
"We sought advice from professionals but they were all wrong" is a red flag phrase on par with "All my exes are crazy"
The video fucked me up. The image of the blood in the water stayed with me for a few days.
