Preface To Ferris Wheels: Ferris Wheel Deaths

(Scary story, scary picture! From here!)

Hey, how safe are ferris wheels, anyway?  I mean, things that spin real fast, & things that travel at great speeds along tiny tracks, they seem inherently unsafe.  But a slowly rotating wheel?  Does that do a lot of people in?

This page lists "Ferris wheel accidents & mishaps dating from 2002 to present" (the present to them appears to be 2013).  A lot of these (in case you don't look) are thankfully not deaths, just accidents.  & a surprising number of them are not patrons of the wheel, but workers in the parks.  You can see items like "worker disassembling a Ferris wheel suddenly became pinned between a rail & the drive wheels" & "34 yr old carnival worker electrocuted when he fell & got tangled up in a wire & died."

But don't get me wrong, there are visitor horrors, too.  The worst:

11 year old girl fell over 100 feet to her death

Ferris wheel catastrophe kills five

Ferris wheel collapsed under strong winds & rain killing 12 people

(Who rides a ferris wheel in the rain?)

According to this infographic from the Huffington Post, ferris wheels are the second-most deadly ride in the amusement park.  This astounds me!  While still being relatively safe - I mean, six people died on roller coasters in 2011 - have a look at the percentage of death by ride per year:

27.6% Roller Coasters
20.7% Ferris Wheels, Gondolas, Cable Rides
15.3% Water Rides
13.6% Spinning Rides
22.7% Other Rides

But wait!  Ferris wheels are lumped with gondolas & cable rides.  So maybe they're only the third or fourth most dangerous ride in the park.  How misleading!

If you scroll down to the bottom of that graphic, you'll see the highest G-force on roller coasters & you'll note it's way higher than a Space Shuttle launch.  That's fucked.

One last note: when you're looking around for statistics online, you often come across a weird kind of treasure trove that promises hours of diversion in the future, & that's true about ride accidents dot com.  The web page looks like it was built in 1997, & it seems to have been abandoned in 2012, but wow, what an obsessive collection it is!  Reading it, I have sworn to never go to an amusement park again,

Except tomorrow, you know, for the ferris wheels.