The Ferris Wheel

Saturday June 4. Today I read that Abiah Jones, an 11 year-old girl from the PleasanTech Academy Charter School of New Jersey, fell from the top of a Giant Ferris wheel in a Wildwood amusement park known as Morey's Mariner's Landing Pier.

Abiah was on an annual school field trip. She was seated alone in an open-air gondola and no one knows exactly how high she was when she fell, although police said it was near the top. Preliminary investigations indicated there was no mechanical failure causing the accident. But Abiah Jones had no seat belt. By the time she hit a metal platform 156 feet below the highest point of the wheel, at 12:30pm, she was dead.

According to a 2010 National Safety Council report, estimated annual injuries in amusement park rides in fixed-site parks (these presumably do not include traveling circuses or mobile amusement parks), are 1,086 annually, or about .6 per million patron rides. [Note: it is entirely plausible that there are more accidents that are not reported.] A spokesperson for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions said that individuals have a 1 in 9 million chance of being seriously injured in America's 400 fixed-site amusement parks (Philadelphia Inquirer June 4 2011, p. A4). She did not comment about whether these odds have improved -- or worsened -- over time. This particular fatality was the first in the Morey's Mariner's Landing Pier history.

Part of the thrill of ferris wheels or roller coasters has always been the feeling that one could fall out of the sky. Humans love the sensation of being hurled and thrust upward, riding in rockets, Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and whirligigs. Yesterday, in the most lovely and sun-burnished June weather, the kind of day that makes one feel that heaven touches earth so children can ride high like angels, Abiah Jones went willingly to her open-air gondola. For whatever reason, in the grip of the whirling wheel, the gondola let go.

Maybe she was playing or screaming with the thrill and not holding on tight. Maybe she grew dizzy, or the gondola may have lurched and upended.

Still, I wonder why one of the tallest Ferris wheels in North America had no seatbelts.

I wonder why engineers or amusement park owners think a beltless Ferris wheel with locked gates is "safe enough" when a child can still tumble 15 stories to her death?