A little before 4 p.m. on Monday, October 12, tragedy struck on Goliath, the 200-foot hypercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia. According to witnesses, a man came out of his seat and struck the ride several times as he fell. He died, and four others were injured.
Riders stranded on the lift hill were walked down an emergency stairway. Cobb County police sent Major Crimes detectives, and Georgia’s insurance and safety fire commissioner said inspectors were on site examining the equipment. By Monday night, Six Flags had shut nine similar coasters at six other parks, "out of an abundance of caution." The numbers seem to vindicate the dread felt before a roller coaster ride.
In the industry’s own 2024 safety survey, compiled by the National Safety Council for the trade group IAAPA, roller coasters produced 1.27 injuries per million rides, up from 0.88 a year earlier. They also accounted for 44 percent of all ride injuries, the highest share the survey has recorded. Two weeks before Goliath, Six Flags permanently retired X2, the marquee coaster at its Magic Mountain park in California, after a CNN investigation documented more than a dozen reports of serious injuries linked to the ride, including at least two deaths.
No federal agency polices rider safety on any of these coasters. Since 1981, consumer-product law has excluded amusement rides "permanently fixed to a site," leaving theme parks to a patchwork of state inspectors. Put together, the story tells itself.
Injuries are climbing, the industry keeps its own score, and a day at a theme park can end in catastrophe. None of that makes Monday less terrible, and every fact in it is accurate. But the conclusion is not.
Start with what that 1.27 means; roughly one injury for every 790,000 coaster rides, where an injury is anything needing more than ordinary first aid. Serious harm, defined as a hospital stay of more than 24 hours or a death, is far rarer—just 8 percent of injuries across all rides in 2024. For coasters, the survey’s 2022 edition put it at about one in every 9 million rides.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
