The New York Times has an article today about new developments in the Kansas park with the world’s tallest water slide:
...At least 14 riders were injured on the slide in a string of accidents that culminated in August 2016, when a 10-year-old boy was tossed off a raft and decapitated when he hit a metal pole.
In an indictment unsealed last week, the authorities said top Schlitterbahn officials knew that the slide, which closed after the boy’s death, posed serious dangers for riders — so much so that company officials feared for their own safety when they went on it.
On Monday, Jeffrey W. Henry, a co-owner of Schlitterbahn Waterparks and Resorts, was arrested in Texas near the border with Mexico on multiple charges in connection to the boy’s death. On Friday, the office of the Kansas attorney general announced that Schlitterbahn Waterpark and Tyler Austin Miles, its former operations director, had been charged with 20 criminal counts, including involuntary manslaughter, aggravated endangering of a child and aggravated battery.
The rest of the article by Jacey Fortin and Matthew Haag gives details. The design process was rushed and not fully vetted by engineers, there were warnings about problems, people were getting injured before the fatal accident…
There’s an idea that a business will regulate itself, because something that kills or injures customers is, de facto, bad for business — except it’s not always that cut and dried. Profit depends on a balance between revenue and expenditures. There’s always pressure to cut expenses, and if those expenses include testing, spending more time when problems are found, setting limits on operation, well the problem is where to make those trade offs? Schlitterbahn seems to have gotten it seriously wrong.
Expecting industry as a whole to regulate itself is just as problematic. How do you get competitors to work together? Each is looking for a competitive edge — trading that off against the risk of one bad apple ruining the whole barrel. Sometimes an entire industry will collude simply because the profits are so big compared to safer alternatives. (Which is how we ended up getting poisoned for decades.)
Legal liabilities — that idea that companies should bear consequences for the way they manage risk and operate their businesses, that there’s a public good at stake outside of the bottom line and shareholder value, well that’s an issue too. (As for example the firearms industry and its exemptions.)
The next time you hear someone complaining about the government stifling innovation and crippling business with “burdensome regulations”, you might want to ask them “What’s the body count so far?”