Argumentative Essay On Amusement Park Safety

A well-timed New York Times story says amusement park safety mishaps “raise the question of whether roller coasters and other thrill rides, which are faster, taller and more extreme than ever, have also become more dangerous.”

The piece ran Sunday and was filed before Saturday’s incident at Cedar Point, in which two guests were injured in an accident on the Skyhawk ride.

It begins by noting recent accidents at Six Flags parks in California and Texas, as well as an accident last summer on Cedar Point’s Shoot the Rapids water ride, where a boat rolled backward and flipped over, injuring at least six people.

Some federal lawmakers are concerned by what they see.

“Roller coasters that hurtle riders at extreme speeds along precipitous drops should not be exempt from federal safety oversight,” Sen. Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, tells The Times. “A baby stroller

“Roughly 300 million people visited the nearly 400 amusement parks in the United States in 2011, taking about 1.7 billion rides, according to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. The chance of being seriously injured at a park is about one in 24 million, association officials say, far less likely than being injured in a car accident or struck by lightning.”

But The Times notes that a 2013 study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus “revealed evidence of frequent injuries among children. More than 93,000 children under 18 were treated in emergency rooms for amusement-park-related injuries between 1990 and 2010.”

Researchers were unable to compile amusement-park-related deaths, but “they estimated that a child is hospitalized once every three days in the summer from an injury related to a park, carnival, fair or arcade ride,” the story notes.

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