Are Theme Parks Taking Public for a Ride?

It’s rarely a good idea to get between Californians and their mass leisure, even when lives and limbs are at stake. Nobody likes a wet blanket. Still, sometimes fair warning is worth the cost of being a downer, which is why Tom Torlakson deserves encouragement this week.

An assemblyman from Antioch in Northern California, Torlakson has been singing more or less solo for some time about the secrecy surrounding safety at California’s theme parks. Though this state has more major theme parks--and more theme park deaths--than any state in the nation, its theme park industry is among the nation’s least scrutinized.

Public records on park injuries, for instance, are virtually nonexistent. Wondering whether your child’s favorite roller coaster is really safe to ride on? Sorry, mom and dad. If you were talking restaurants or hospitals or airlines, you could find out in a minute. But when it comes to children hurtling over steel escarpments--well, we don’t go there.

Last year, Torlakson sponsored a bill that would have required inspections and accident reporting for theme parks. But, as has been the drill for decades here, industry lobbyists snuffed it out. Now, in the wake of the December accident that killed a Disneyland patron and maimed his wife and a park worker, Torlakson is again gauging support for legislation to be introduced next month.

It has been argued that any oversight would be a cumbersome downer, given that theme park fatalities are rare. Millions of people get whipped around on roller coasters and bumper cars and Ferris wheels and what-have-you on an annual basis, and the death rate is somewhere between the odds of dying on the freeway and being hit by a meteor.

But mere injuries--if “mere” is the word here--are another matter. Turns out there are many more than people realize. And it is in this gap between fact and perception that fun has festered into something like disinformation. If you think that’s no problem, talk to Kathy Fackler, who knows more than a mother should about the argument’s other side.

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Last March, Fackler, a 40-year-old homemaker from La Jolla, took her little boys to Disneyland. She was sitting between them on the Thunder Mountain ride when her 5-year-old put his foot outside the open-sided car, where it became lodged between the running board and the passenger platform; the force tore it virtually in half. It took an hour to get the terrified kindergartner to the hospital, where they amputated the toes from one foot. Months passed before the little boy could run and play normally again.

Fackler and her husband were philosophically opposed to the thought of a lawsuit. Nor was it worth it to them, financially and emotionally, to sue. They did, however, come away convinced that Californians are being hurt by what they don’t know.

“I have never read, or seen on television, a single report of an accident at Disneyland,” Kathy Fackler wrote to the Walt Disney Co. six months before the Dec. 24 fatality. “Perhaps [my son] is the first person in the history of your park to be hurt. Perhaps not. In any case, the absence of such reports perpetuates the illusion that accidents never happen at Disneyland. And if accidents never happen at Disneyland, then the warning signs and height restrictions and restraint systems must be adequate protection. At an unconscious level, I abdicate my responsibility to them.

“I read the warning, ‘Keep hands and arms inside,’ and I forget that my 5-year-old doesn’t read. I forget that he is unlikely to connect the action of straightening his leg with certain disaster. I forget that we are screaming around a track in an open-sided car designed and built by fallible human beings.

“Because accidents never happen at Disneyland,” the mother wrote, “I forget to be afraid for my child.”

Which is precisely the problem, and not just at the Magic Kingdom. Here’s hoping Tom Torlakson’s call for fairer warning will become a chorus in Sacramento this time.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.