The North Carolina State Fair closed on Sunday. Our ride accident injury attorneys note that on Monday, workers began disassembling and taking down the rides. The Vortex ride operated by Family Attractions Amusement Company had been closed since an accident on Thursday that seriously injured 5 people. But there was another Vortex ride on the midway that had been part of the North Carolina State Fair for several years and apparently was not operated by Family Attraction Amusement Company.
That ride’s large and heavy seating section collapsed Monday morning on top of one of the workers disassembling it, trapping his pelvis and legs under the heavy equipment. The worker had to be freed from the heavy ride parts and was in critical condition in the intensive care unit of the same hospital that received some of the injured riders from the other Vortex accident. (Source: Robert Willett, News and Observer via the Associated Press, usnews.nbcnews.com, 10/28/13) Our hearts and prayers are with the injured worker.
Should the North Carolina State Fair continue its tradition of having a Vortex ride on the midway in coming years, the ride accident injury attorneys at Denena Points, PC wonder how many will dare to ride it. The Vortex accidents’ proximity to the Halloween season almost makes it seem as if the Vortex has a mind of its own, and that mind is not kindly disposed to people.
In the second Vortex accident it was a worker injured, and not fairgoers. For safety reasons, we would think that ride assembly and disassembly should be done in accordance with tried and true procedures. And that workers would have proper safety equipment. Details we could find were very sketchy about what happened in this accident. And our ride accident injury attorneys wonder: what went wrong? What safety procedures failed, were ignored, or were simply not in place at the time of the accident?
Click the link to read about the first Vortex accident at the North Carolina State Fair just a few days before that resulted in injuries to five people and the arrest of the ride operator after investigators found evidence of tampering with safety devices. Authorities indicated that the ride had been tampered with after its last inspection in order to keep the ride operating. It seems obvious to us that if you have to disable safety features in order to encourage a ride to keep working, it’s time to shut that ride down. It’s sad that many of the pressures of modern society skew our priorities in such a way as to blind us to safety concerns. The ride accident injury attorneys at Denena Points, PC see it occurring everywhere all the time, but people almost never take note unless it ends in a particularly horrific accident.
Every morning as workers afraid of being late to their jobs speed and take chances on the road, accidents occur that injure others. The crashes reveal the same sort of skewed decision-making process at work. It’s better to arrive late at work than not at all. And we’d suggest that it’s better to lose a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars shutting down a faulty ride than to have to pay millions in damages after a perfectly avoidable accident.