Theme Park Accidents Lead to Business As Usual

I just read a piece by Nick VinZant at local news Channel 13 here.  The gist of the piece is that accidents with injuries or death at any of the Orlando-area theme parks have very little, if any, impact on the traffic or visitation of the parks. A professor from the University of Central Florida was interviewed and said he thought Sea World should expect no short or long-term consequences as the result of the recent death of a killer whale trainer following an encounter with a killer whale.  The professor did note that sometimes the theme parks institute their own changes in procedure, but not always.

This has also been our experience with handling injury cases at the theme parks and water parks.  Theme parks seem slow to institute changes to safety policies and procedures.  In our experience, the local theme parks and water parks are very difficult to convince that they’ve done anything careless or negligent.  Even when we convince them that they were negligent and get them to settle claims, they routinely force confidentiality provisions into settlement agreements and general releases.  Of course, the affect of these confidentiality provisions is that the public-at-large never learns about the dangerous condition.

No wonder the parks never see descreasing attendance numbers.