Doomed to Fail - Ep 69 - Click in and Buckle up: Roller Coaster Accidents

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

We're back from vacation! Farz went to Dollywood, was brave, and rode all the rides! Then, he came home and researched Roller Coaster accidents so the rest of us would never go on a ride again! First, he tells about 52-year-old Rosa Ayala-Gaona Esparza, who was violently thrown from a coaster at Six Flags Over Texas. Then, the story of John Harter, a 17-year-old who met his end in a fake Eifel Tower in Ohio. Finally, a 10-year-old met the most violent of deaths on the most giant waterslide of all time.We're very nervous. This week's episode is brought to you by NauTee Studio! Check them out on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/NauteeStudio Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. We are recording, and we are live and back from a trip and the holiday, first holiday, out of a series of two holidays. I know that for okay I might as well start with introducing us welcome to do to fail the podcast where we cover things that we're doomed to fail I cover true crime usually Taylor covers history although we kind of mix and match our premise for the show I'm Farr's joined here by Taylor hi Taylor hello I was going to start with something there and I totally lost my kind of thought cool sweet Cool. Well, it's good to be back. Holidays. That's what it was. First round of holidays complete. Second round of holiday is about to start up. Taylor and I took a very, very lovely two weekends off from recording or editing.

Taylor stayed incredibly busy, releasing additional content, old episodes, re-releasing them, as well as putting out content on social media, which has been incredible. So thank you for your contribution there, Taylor. You're welcome. I took a while and set up. Once it was set up, it just like happened on its own, which was very nice. Perfect. Perfect. So and Taylor and I just got a chance to actually hang out in person. We hung out quite a bit. We were in North Carolina. We were in Asheville together and went to a friend's wedding. Congratulations for our friends, Jen Beth on their nuptials and on their Panama slash Colombian vacay that they're on now.

Yeah. Got to see lovely lovely Biltmore. I took a little roach about there with with Taylor and got to do that, which was really, really fun. It was awesome. Yeah, we had a great time. I can't believe that was only a week ago. I'm like, has happened so wild all this shit goes just goes by so fast but we had a really good time so yes and as part of my episode for today which is kind of part of the theme of the episode today my trip out after the wedding extended past just north carolina into tennessee which allowed me to visit pigeon forge tennessee which if you don't know is the home of dollywood which is the dolly pardon resort i mean it's like a dolly themed resort basically Basically, not a resort.

It's a dolly themed amusement park, like two resorts that are on site. Oh, my God, fun. Did you stay at one of them? I did. I did. It was, I stayed at, the resorts were named after her albums. And so one of her albums called Heart Song. And so I stated the Hard Song Resort, which was brand new, actually.

Like I literally think we're the first people to stay in that hotel room. It opened, I think they said eight months ago, and you could tell. It was just so perfect, so immaculate. Yeah, it was really, really cool. really cool it was way too expensive like for what it was sure like i mean i mean they definitely all things yeah they're all all too expensive oh it's cute yeah i mean one thing i would say so what i had several thoughts i was going to share here with this so what first things first is when i first got there i went through stages first when i got there i was like what are we doing

here everybody hears like eight years old they're all riding in rascal scooters and they're all like all but just screaming don't trump in your face for no reason and and i was like this i've made a terrible mistake because now we're here we booked it for two nights i already bought the tickets to dollywood and was like what the hell i didn't like seriously like i've always known who who Dolly Parton was because I was always in the country music, but I never liked her music. So I was like, what am I doing here? And the first night there was a blast,

had a great time, we're just joking amongst ourselves. We're literally the only people under like 75 years old that were hanging out there. And so we just had a good time to ourselves. The next day, we went to Dollywood itself. We literally went there before the park opened. It was like, it was exactly out of National Lampoon's family vacation. We got there and we're like, this feels like Wally World.

like there's a little bit here we got there before opening and then they let you in ahead of opening and you can kind of wander around and i started getting enamored with it it's like this old country vibe this old tiny vibe is a day progressed more and more younger people came out and started doing their thing but oh yeah it opens at 11 that's late yeah i thought so too so look at that up because i was like that's weird to get there early but no opens out 11 that feels yeah i mean we woke up we had breakfast like what are we going to do like there's nothing to do like the resort isn't like a cool resort it's not like summer but there's a pool but it's not open right yeah you couldn't really use it anyways and so we got there like 10 30 and then like at this moment

where they like did the pledge of allegiance and everybody stops and like starts like looking up with the flag and i was just like what what are we doing like i mean not do the pledge of religions like does everybody have to like it felt kind of culty and i got that vibe anyways because like the day before we're hanging out the bar at the resort and everybody's talking about dolly oh my god i love dolly dolly's the best person in the world she's so great she said i was just like oh my god you people drive me insane she's like a human being she's not like a symbol of something but then i sort researching dolly part and it was like she's actually a really great person yeah she's she's pretty great and i think i think you texted me this but it just she's definitely not a

mega republican like she gives she has that beautiful charity that gives kids books she invested in the moderna vaccine like she's not yeah yeah she donated for the development of the modern of the covid vaccine yeah gifts a book every month for every child you want to get read a book to until they're like in first grade or something i forgot what it was like it's like a beautiful thing that she has yeah yeah she's been married to her husband for like 67 years like and then And then she owns half of Dollywood. So obviously, she's not like a resort maker. She's not like an amusement park maker.

So she partners with people to do this stuff. And then you really is like, oh, this whole area is obsessed with this woman because this was nothing. It was like a blown out, nothing town. These people take so much pride in being in Pigeon Forge and being associated with Dolly Parton. And they kind of resources. That totally makes sense. It was incredible. I was talking to Rachel about this while I was saying that I went to.

downstairs one day and I was just going to get some from a snack bar they had in the resort. And this guy wheels out this giant like cart full of tools and stuff. And he just like puts one dab of paint that only this one part that's like, and we mean it nice. Yeah, like Taylor, you didn't see the hotel. We sit down in Asheville that shared in four points. But that place was like completely crumbling to the ground and nobody gave a shit. They're like they take so much pride and everything there.

It was really cool to see actually. It looks nice. And one thing I did there that I usually don't do, but I did it because it's like there's nothing else going on was there's, it's an amusement park. Dollywood's an amusement park. So they have all kinds of rides and like roller coasters and we went on one roller coaster and it was fun because there's like this slow little windy thing through this old country village.

It was like a kid's coaster basically. Like oh, that was great. Yeah, this is my speed. I was looking around. Everybody hears on rascal scooters like there's no chance they have like really thrilling ride so yeah let's go ride some roller coasters we get on the next one and then we sit in sit in this thing and it's like empty it's like we're the only ones again it's like opening and these harnesses come down over us and we look at each other and we're like is this going to go upside down like

why else would there be a harness that comes over us and like a geriatric amusement park this thing taylor just would do loop after loop after loop and i was just like oh i was just screaming i had my eyes close screaming the entire time i'm not a roller coaster guy i can't can't do roller coaster it sounds it sounds like you're not a roller coaster like my thing is like everything is trying to kill you 100 times a day anyways so why introduce the variable of a roller coaster you're trusting a 16 year old and maintenance workers who you probably wouldn't trust to like watch your house with your life in the most gruesome things that can potentially happen to you and so that's like always was running in my mind regardless i ended up writing a lot i wrote it down here

I rode two roller coasters three times, no, three roller coasters twice and then three additional roller coasters, but one of them, Taylor, it was called Thunderhead. It was a completely wooden roller coaster. Talk about scariest shit. You're all the way up on this narrow thing that's being supported by two by fours. Oh, I see it. It is terrifying. And one thing it did, because it goes, it goes. It goes. like 53 miles per hour it shoots you down this hill and like at a hundred 100 foot hill you go down it you're going 53 miles per hour you go into this right turn and in your mind you're like all this wood holding this whole thing together is just going to turn into like toothpicks like it is here and you can feel it's shaking too you can feel it like flexing the woods flexing like how am i why did I do this like it was just absolutely that one I did not do again um well I used live next to a great a great

America, Six Flags, and I used to go all the time. Now that I'm older, I need to take, like, a dramamine and, like, get in the spirit, and then I can do it, you know? But I'm looking at the Thunderhead, and it says that during the spring and fall, there has a lot of bees. Yeah, and probably a shitload of termites. There's probably just, yeah. Palli Pard is not going to let you die at her theme park.

I feel like, Walt Disney would let you go. Dalli Pardt wouldn't. So, interestingly enough, there was one ride that. that was right that's right outside of the thunderhead it's one of those ones where it lifts you all the way up and you're in like this like circular structure and then it just drops you you know what you're talking about yeah yeah i was like i'm not writing that one that's like the one that i will i will gladly opt out of what i found out was that that same ride a duplicate of it like they produced several of those somebody died in it in orlando and yes because he was

too big well was that it mm-hmm okay i think that was the one he didn't it didn't it didn't like close on him right yeah yeah well what that dolly wood ended up doing was they ended up shutting down that ride until that investigation ended because you're right again like they do things in a very very family safe way um but then also like accents can't happen right like should happen so that's what you know did you go to the bird show the bird show was closed it was too cold for the birds but it is incredible when you walk by it you're like you're just looking at like um nature right like there's nothing there like and then you like look up and you're like oh my god there's a bald eagle and then you realize you're in an outside aviary there's like 50 bald

eagles it was insane it was incredible it was so cool so 10-10 recommend if anybody can make it a pigeon force to see it is absolutely worth taking a trip out there those people take so much pride and everything they do it was awesome so but it led me to my topic for today which I'm diverting from engineering disasters into amusement park disasters because it feels like it's timely because it's all I could think about after we got to like oh it's safe you're like oh here's a bad thing that happened okay let me tell you what I'm most afraid of okay I'm most afraid of getting stuck upside down oh my god is that is that your story that's the thing that like I feel like if you're some people get like it stops in the middle of the loop and you hang

upside down for like an hour and when you are upside down even with the momentum on your body you know you're going up like you can feel your body's like pressing downward you're like this restraint is the only thing yeah keep me alive right now that is absolutely terrifying yeah so in the course of exploring some of these tragedies that have an amusement part several things became clear one amusement parks really really really hate talking about this stuff so So getting details is so hard unless it's like a big old massive media. Unless it's the worst possible situation, it is impossible to get details out of this. My last story, I'm going to cover three stories.

I might cover four. I don't know. I don't feel iffy about one of them. I'm going to definitely do three, though. The last story I'm going to do had the most detail because it was the most tragic, the most scary, the most, like, obviously fucked up. it had the most press coverage. And so, like, I actually pulled the court transcripts for it. Went through every detail.

It is, yeah, it is, it is very well documented. And that will point out to you, that last case will point out to you how bad the circumstances of water park or amusement parks reporting injuries to the public because in the court case, that's the only place you'll go where you can actually get an itemized list of all the issues that are on the ride that I'm going to cover at the very end. So that means, yeah. I feel very. I have a little bit of a stomach bug, so I might have to leave to throw up.

But you just, now I feel even more nervous. Like, my stomach hurts are being nervous. So feel free to throw up. So we're going to start out with one of my first theme party experiences, which is just like yours, actually, Taylor, Six Flags. So Six Flags, I was raised in Texas and Dallas, and a city right next to Dallas is Arlington. And Arlington, Texas is home of the very first six flags.

It's also the home of the Six Flags HQ, their headquartered there. They currently operate 27 theme parks across North America. And the Arlington one happens to be their biggest, their best, the one that they spend all their resources on the most. And that is home to a specific roller coaster called the Texas Giant, which opened in 1990. Wait, can you stop for a second? Yes.

I just learned this, I think on last podcast or somewhere, that one of the six flags was the Confederate flag. I was going to ask, like, I didn't know why they call them six flags. What is the six flags? This is what I just learned like recently. They're the six flags of the different nations that have governed Texas. I mean, minus the indigenous people who live there forever before that. So it was Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, United States of America, and the Confederate States of America.

But they must have replaced that Confederate flag with some. Yeah, probably a good move. I think they opened up. i think they first started in like the 1960s and at that time i guess they had an like everywhere was more normal yeah so it depends and in texas it times where you are getting you yes so we're going to go back to 2013 we're going to go back to july 19 of 2013 there's this 52 year old woman her name is rosa asparza and she visits the six flag park with her family she's in tow with her husband and she has like four kids but only two of them are

with her in this situation there are two teenage kids once a son one's a daughter and the three of them mom and son and daughter board the texas giant at the time the texas giant was the biggest roller coaster in the world um it wasn't i mean when you look at the stats now you're like who cares like literally like the kid right at dollywood was more intense on this but at the time it was like a big deal so at the when they wrote the texas giant it was actually called the new Texas Giant. All they basically do was just remodeled part of it, but they called the New Texas Giants. So when you do the, if you look at this up yourself, you're going to see it called the New Texas Giant. They renovated in 2010. These will visit in 2013.

The restraint for this ride was a lap bar that came down from overhead to lock you in place. So nervous right now. Taylor, these things freak this shit out of me. So like, so I'm going to tell you two stories, okay? So one was when I was living in Florida, we went to, we went to, um, Universal Studios in Orlando. And there was a line. It was right when the Harry, potter thing universe opened and there was a crazy line for the actual harry potter ride we decided let's just go to the flight of the hippodrome hippodump something whatever like it was it was like a smaller kid's ride like right next to the bigger adult harry potter ride and i got in this thing and the thing came

down i was like this is a slow ride it's not that big of a deal anyways it didn't really click and they just let it go like and i'm i still fit like my my body's not going to fit in this thing Or like, it's like a 15-year-old, they do that thing where they just go, like, with their two fingers, and they're like, oh, yeah, exactly. It's good. I'm like, oh, really? Brad, you think this is good? Come on, you just did this. I'm doing it on a book. I'm showing you what I'm doing, but you know what I mean. Yeah, no, and this thing takes off. I was like, who cares? It's a kid's ride. Like, how bad can it possibly be? The thing started doing, like, going like, almost like sideways.

The sideways, yeah. And I was just like, I pushed my feet as. hard as I could into the basis thing to keep myself in position because I was like nothing was restraining me. I was just in there holding myself into position. I have to make my sweater off and I'm getting hot. I am so a couple things. There's one we went to legoland a couple years ago and there's a picture of Miles and my mother-in-law I'm one of those and it's like turning really fast and they're she's like they're both laughing but I'm like she's holding on time for dear life because Miles is like way too small and then also another thing my friend I have a friend

named Taylor and he's six eight and sometimes there's things and they're like you can't go on this yeah yeah your head will get so one thing they do at dollywood which is great i've been seen other theme parks do it i'm sure they do but when they do is that when you are before you even can enter the queue for the line to get on the ride they have seats outside and they seats outside have lights on them yeah so you sit in it and then you can close the restraint and then if you get a green light you can go if you don't you can't go and so yeah that's a good yeah Yeah, that fooded me out of one of the rides, but that was basically it. Good.

Blair and I used to, my sister and I used to stuff our shoes with paper towels to be taller to be able to ride, like, the Batman ride, like, the bigger rides in, like, in a Great America. And then by the end of the day, we, like, couldn't ride them because the paper towels would be smushed because their feet were, like, soaking wet. I'm just thinking there all day. You were way more of a dare double than I am. I can't believe if I did that. Now, I would go on a couple, maybe, and then maybe throw up and then maybe be, like, I don't know, if I wanted it again. Yeah, fair.

enough. Um, so going back to Rosa, uh, she gets in this ride that the New Texas giant, in theory, she's getting locked into places overhead restraint because this is one of those loop loop, um, loop, uh, roller coasters. When, when she's on the ride, she mentions to the attendee, the staffer there that she doesn't think that the thing clicked in a place. Like she didn't think it was it fit right. Witnesses reported that she asked the park employee if she was okay and basically the employee was like yeah it's fine as long as you're her to click we're fine when this is noted that everyone else's restraint clicked a bunch it would go like like do that thing and they were saying like oh would they notice it was noticeable enough

that hers went click and that was basically it i can't feel my arms i had like stand up and put a fan on i'm gonna like put my head between my legs keep going i'm so i mean everybody knows this but the but basically like with a chain lift roller coaster like now they have maglev ones and all that stuff but with a chainlift one you basically the ride starts by pulling the train and the cars up this giant hill and then when you get to the top you have it it'll release and then you basically have all the momentum to go go down and drop in this case the drop is 153 feet which is like it's okay like now there's a thing called giga coasters which are 300 feet foot drops there's also a thing called straticoasters which are

400 foot drops but this is 150 so so so Okay. Go ahead. Basically, what people reported was as soon as a car goes up in crests and starts falling, Rosa flies 70 feet away from the coaster and nobody knows what happened to her. Her kids see this. And they're still on it. And they have to be on it.

The right last, I think it was like three minutes and 20 seconds, they still have to sit on this ride while they saw their mom flying 70 feet 153 feet down to the ground which is like bad really bad so the kids go through go through this and the second the ride stops they hop out they start running and screaming they try to go into the restricted area they get pulled back the police are notified they start doing a search trying to figure out what happened this woman and it took hours to figure out what happened but she ended up landing on the roof that's like adjacent to the queue area where people were standing line to you on the Texas giant and no one like heard it i guess somebody heard it i don't know maybe like it's loud maybe it's loud and would you ever assume it's a body falling on you like

no but i mean i feel like you'd see her like outline is it i don't know i don't know it's crazy that no one saw it or heard it uh would they say is that based on how they found her body and the amount of force with which she would have hit that roof she would have died instantly immediately dead yeah yeah thank god for that at least so they launched an investigation six flags blames the manufacturer the manufacturer blamed six flags the family shoes a shot out of both of them they end up settling for an understore some some say that was like about a million dollars which does what seems like crazy light and six flags ultimately never access to responsibility for rosa's death what they ended up doing though was they added a seatbelt to every one of their

roller coasters so now you're no longer only restrained but restrained by the top thing you're also restrained with like a seatbelt and they added to every single one of their coasters across their entire park network it's worth noting that six flags point on this was that all this stuff about clicking their take on it was that's not possible all of our rides had this like magnetic thing going on inside them where what's actually holding you in place is like a switch that is is flipped when you're in the initial waiting area and that's what locks everything in place their point was you wouldn't have heard a click i didn't go into research in this but i'm sure you're I could find it pretty easily if I asked, like,

people like, hey, have you been on the new techs giant? Was there a clique? Like, you see who's lying in who's not. The end of the day, woman's, she's gone, and her kids had to watch for her fault for a horrible, horrible death 10 years ago. Oh my God, that's horrifying. Well, I guess, so wait, so what do you mean?

So the click is like superficial? Well, what Six Flags is actually saying is they couldn't have heard a click anyways. Like, that's not even a possibility given how the safety restraint is supposed to work. Um, so that's their point. Their point is that this was like a manufacturer error with like a faulty design defect, uh, and had nothing to do with maintenance or anything else.

It's, it's saying that her, her body was nearly severed in half. It was. Yeah. Yeah, she hit the thing with, I mean, it's a lot of force. Poor lady. Not good. Yeah, I read that like she came over from, uh, from some part of of Mexico to like get her kids a better life and like she's almost saw it in half like any flung out of her this is what you know like I've been in a situation before where like my parents like they're not they're not at all risk takers I've been like come on let's do it let's do it just don't do it like you're people know what's good for their body especially when you're 52 years old like just yeah like you're already you would have done it earlier it's like me and like

I'm never going to learn how to ski because I didn't learn how to ski when I was like 10 so it's over for me you know you can't learn to ski when you're 41 you'll die I've been asked if I want to go on scuba trips before or like learn to scuba. I'm like, fuck that. It's like, it's just, it passed me. There's a lot of other ways I can die. I don't need that to be added to it. 100%.

I don't want to lose you in an underwater cave. So scary. So we're going to go from that story to Ohio. But before that, we're going to take a quick commercial break and be right back. This week's episode of Doom to Fail is brought to you by Nau Tea Studio. Are you looking? for some holiday merch for a friend's gift exchange, a fun gift for a sibling secret Santa, check out the collection of inappropriate holiday sweaters and gifts from Naughty Studio.

We definitely don't recommend them for a work party, but we do recommend them for a family party where you'd like to make someone uncomfortable and also take a few minutes to yell about free speech because this is America. Find Naughty Studio, that's N-A-U-T-E-E-S studio, on Instagram and Etsy. Use a promo code, let's do this, for 15% off your order. That's not We'll put the link in our show notes and happy holidays from us. Thanks. We're going to go to a place called Kings Island, which is an amusement park in Ohio. And a little bit of background on this. So this park was originally called Coney Island, which is kind of interesting. It was on the banks of the Ohio River.

And it was basically just a small little, it looked like a county fair type of a thing. And it started in 1964, and the issue they were having was that every small time it would get rainy in Ohio, the Ohio River floods, it washes away half the park, and they have to rebuild it. So like, fuck this, we're not going to do this anymore. Let's go more inlands. They built this park a little north of Cincinnati, essentially, which ended up actually resembling more of what we currently look at as an amusement park. What's worth noting is that our cultural fascination or interests in roller coasters started with this park. This park was the first one to introduce, like, more thrill rides. as opposed to like campground fair amusement park or county fair

and one ride that's going to come in later on this story is called The Racer and that was kind of the original impetus for revitalizing America's love and interest and fascination with roller coasters so that's fun as part of one of the themes within this park they had a one-third scale replica of the Eiffel Tower still big And it went through Rupka of an Eiffel Tower is still pretty huge. It's about 300 feet. And it was kind of stationed near the entryway of the park. I pulled up maps to this thing.

It's really meant to be like, it's kind of like how the golf falls in the centerpiece of Epcot. The Eiffel Tower is the centerpiece of King's Island, essentially. Why? I don't know. I never got a sense of why they decided to build the, and they did two of them. Later on, they also created another Eiffel Tower. What's called King's Court? There's another theme park somewhere that they,

this company also launched, they also put the Eiffel Tower there. It's actually really popular, apparently. Like it's still functional, still operational and everything. So more power to them. It kind of functions as a little bit of ride, sort of. So basically, it's like the Eiffel Tower, right? The Eiffel Tower is just a bunch of steel trusses. And in the middle of it, there's an elevator.

And the point of the elevator was to take you all the way to the top. You get out, there's an observation deck. I looked at YouTube videos. This looks actually really, really cool. You get this amazing 360 view of like the area the park itself which is really awesome and especially because you're looking at all these massive roller coaches that you're now taller then so this story happens in may of 1983 kings island uh would host annually would host a grad night which is a night for teens we're graduating from the area

to come to the park they get discount tickets they get premium you know line cutting and all that stuff and so it's like a night for the grads like just enjoy your night with your friends before you all go off and have your lives destroyed by college loans and so exactly it's exactly what it is so on this night there's a 17-year-old guy named john harger he was there with his girlfriend pam and a group of their friends and they were all basically there to have a good time long story short was that they drank a lot well we don't know if they all drank a lot we know that john drank a shitload he like gone to fights with his girlfriend and stuff like it sounded a lot like more of my tumultuous relationships but what was noted was that Ohio state law was very lax

when he came to like underage drinking and so it is presumed that he was drunk as shit when he got to the park and he kept drinking when he was at the park not great so the group got on the first ride which was called the racer and that's a roller coaster ride and that's the one that I mentioned it was actually it was actually featured in the Brady bunch sitcom at one point they all went to a theme Park and they rode the racer. It's the one that ignited our fascination with roller coasters. But they get off this ride and they end up kind of regrouping with each other a little bit down the road and try to figure out what they're going to do next. John was not with them in this group. We're going to segue from the experience of their friends now to the experience of what John

was actually doing when he got off Racer. So if you look at a map, Racer is. kind of the first right off the left when you get to this theme park and then directly next to it is this ipol tower observation thing so the the iFle tower has two observation platforms one is 50 feet and the other is 275 feet up and usually what you do is you get in the line you got on this elevator the elevator takes you up you can get off of the 50 foot mark you get up at the 275 mark and then you do your thing and the elevator takes you all back down so that's that that's the point of that but the other thing it has is a flat of stairs so there's a flat of stairs that takes you almost to the very top but to get to the very top you can have like special access to all

that so it makes sense you'd have to be able to walk down in case of an emergency yeah exactly exactly so what john was trying to do is get to the very top but without running the elevator so what he did was being drunk he walked up this elevator or the uh the stairs up the eyeful tower he gets close to 270 feet up high and can't go any further he then crosses over to the railing he crosses over the and he starts shimmying across these eye beams because again it's like the iiffel tower it's just a bunch of scaffolding holding this ship together He shimmies to the center of this Eiffel Tower, stairs down into the nearly 300 foot void below him.

Kids, like, just drink at home. Just drink. I understand wanting to drink at a theme park, 100%. But you're going to throw up at the very best. At the very best. Yeah. Very worst is what's going to happen to you. So what ended up happening was,

the ride was still operational. So as John's leaning over staring into this point, what he doesn't realize is that he's in the fucking elevator shaft. Oh, no. So what happens is the way elevators work obviously is that you have to have a counterweight, right? So when the elevator's going up, the counterweight's going down, it goes down, the operational function of it. And so what John's not seeing is the elevators going up. the thing is coming down the counterweight is coming down the counterweight smacks him he lands on the top of the elevator and like people hear the sound like that's weird i wonder what that was goes all the way to the top impaling him on exposed metal wires and rebar at the top of this thing and so he's like he's like semi alive no yeah and then and then they end up going down all the way and he was impaled on the rebar enough to where he is

his body didn't exit with the elevator when I went down. And so his elevator is going down, he ends up somehow his body slips out from all the fucking blood that's probably pouring out of them. And he lands on top of this thing. And they're like, that's weird. That's never happened before. None of the stories tell you this. And it's hard to get details because it's 1983 and they were not that fast.

Same with Gore. I can only assume there was just pools of blood falling from the roof on top of these people, which would be like the most metal way to go ever oh my god because that's ultimately how they discovered that john was on the roof with this fucking thing he'd fallen after being impaled on rebar all the way back down he was like up and then like back down oh my god meanwhile the friends have been searching for john this whole time and the police are there on the scene and they're like we don't know who this is there's he's 17 years old he has no ID we've no idea of this kid is the park starts shutting down the kids go tell staff that their friends been missing

The police eventually connect the dots and realize that, oh, this is what ended up happening to this guy. He ended up, this is the same guy. And so that was it, 17 years old, dead and buried. Yeah. It's awful. Went straight to the ground. Not good.

Well, when you're a teenager, you do so many stupid things. Like, there's so many times where I could have died and I didn't die. And it's just fucking luck that I'm not dead. Seriously. I think about the shit that I did when I was a kid or like a teenager. I'm like, I shake thinking about how reckless I was. Yeah. Yeah.

It's crazy. Totally. Totally. I remember one time when I was in college, my friend of the time, we were in the same dorm. He was like, hey, let's use the fire escape to climb up to the roof of the building and like drink on the roof of this building. Sounds a good idea. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. And then I got like half of it was like, oh my god, this is for emergencies.

Like there's nothing underneath me. Like there's no, nothing holds. If I let go, like there's no backup. Like nobody's coming to save me. It was the worst. It's stuff like that. down so many of those things yeah so stupid so on tour third and final story i'm gonna skip the one it happened in china it sounded pretty gnarly but like again it's it's it's trying like it's hard to

get the information it's hard to get the details out of this stuff and so if i don't have enough details to make it fun and interesting i'm not going to go through it there's actually another one that also thought about covering that didn't cover that one i'll just tell you real quick so this happened in disney and this this girl's name was deborstone i think she was 18 years old it was one of her first jobs And she was basically a host on America Sings, which is this ride sort of where the audience sits in one spot and then there's a rotating stage. So on one stage, as you're looking at the, they're singing this, they're doing this one performance while they're doing a different performance on a stage over to you and a different performance on the other stage. And there's audiences at each one of the stages. Then the whole thing shifts, puts you in front of the new audience and then you start singing and doing good thing again.

was supposed to be introducing people and doing all that some kind of sitting off the side apparently what she ended up doing was her hair or something got caught in like some of the machinery and she ended up being pulled in between this rotating stage as it was rotating and just being crushed and what people could hear was every single time the thing would rotate they just hear screams and they they're hours later they realized that it was Deborah in between there but it's happened like the 1950s like the details are sparse like that's all we really know the zone yeah no other fun gory details. But this one has plenty of great details, which is very terrible. This ride, I'm sure, most of you all heard this story, this ride is called Baruch. And it's, it was operated by Schlitterbahn, which is a water park theme park. It was based out of New Brunfels, Texas, that expanded into other states and territories. So this also took place to the site of our horrific Hyatt disaster, Kansas City, Missouri. So I don't know what's haunting Kansas City, but yeah, my admiration history. Varuch, are you going to talk about what that means? I was literally going to ask you if you knew what it means because you surprised me sometimes.

I do. I looked it up again because I wanted to make sure I was right, but it made the word made me scared. It means despicable loathsome, like bad, very bad. Okay, so the version that I read was that it means crazy or insane. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So in 2014, Shlurban opened this ride. called Baruch, which is a giant water slide. And on its opening day, it got the distinction of being

the tallest and fastest water slide in the world. The Guinness Booker World Records showed up. They had a whole festival about it. It was a big deal. The drop, the initial drop on this water slide is 168 feet tall, which for a roller coaster isn't that big a good deal. But for water slide, a lot more random elements that you can't really control.

This is a 17-story drop is what it basically amounts to. Right, that's helpful. I don't really know like the feats of things. Right, right. So that's helpful. Thank you. Yes. The way the ride works was writers who would start at the very base and all this is bad.

So writers would start at the base and they would be weighed. And so they would put riders because they had to meet a minimum weight threshold. The raft without riders or sorry, the raft with riders had to weigh a minimum of 400 pounds. the maximum capacity weigh was 550 you'll know why in a little bit later so what they would do is they would weigh everyone and they say okay you're a hundred pounds you're 200 that guy is 100 you all are together you all right together basically that's like then you walk 17 stories up to get loaded onto this raft and then go to the ride so what is it happening is the way the ride is designed is that when you get dropped

you start going downhill, you do the 17-story drop, which looks crazy steep. Like it doesn't look like a gradient at all. Then the ride curves up, and it's pushed up a second hill, mostly by momentum, but also through like these water jet propulsion systems in the slide. And then it's supposed to go down a second smaller descent. Then it lands in this like water-filled area where it's supposed to be like a breaker to slow down the slide and get you stops. There's a problem with the slide.

the problem well there's a lot of problems on the slide but one of the bigger more obvious problems was that on this second ascent over the hill every now and then there was a tendency for these rafts to go airborne which you don't want at all so it is around so also one of the things that were trying to do to kind of slow down the amount of people that were going airborne was they designed what are called brake mats. So these are just like mats that are installed on a slide. There's friction that caused when the raft goes over it. It's supposed to slow the wrap down so that you don't go airborne.

Some of these weren't installed. Some of these were not, but it was part of the, part of the initial design. It's just like that is God telling you not to make them this tall. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much, I'm going to tell you so many things about that. Taylor, like that was a big part of this. So during the main descent,

and second hill part of the ride there was a net that was suspended over riders and it was fastened to the slide with loops so there's a loop this slide and then there's a net above you on august 7th 2016 a 10-year-old boy named caleb schwaab and two sisters named matraca bates and hannah barnes got into what is going to be referred to in court documents as raft B at Verrook. And they crested the, they went down and they crested the second hill and the raft became airborne. We're going to talk about weight. People don't like to talk about weight.

I'm going to talk about weight. This is math weight. This isn't like... Math weight. This is math weight. Yes. Oh my God. Caleb, the position of the individuals and their individual weights is super, super relevant to this.

So Caleb was in the very front. front. So here's the first one in the raft. He weighed 74 pounds, 10 year old boy. One of the within Matraka weighed 275 pounds. The other woman, Hannah, weighed 197 pounds. So with that essentially means if you have, what's his face, Caleb in the front, it needs you have 472 pounds on the back of this thing with 74 pounds on the front. That gives you a weight distribution of 87 to 13 really bad super janky like really not a good evenly disread a weight situation right because it doesn't matter like it matters like how much they weigh combined but it also matters like you can't have like a 499 pound person and a one pound person yeah exactly exactly

exactly so the ride goes down this goes up the second hill and Caleb's head was or his body was forced upward because you have 472 pounds of drag on the back of this thing. So like imagine that. Like it's going up and then and then it just basically does this. You can't, nobody can see my hands when I'm making the hand motion sale up. I was making the biggest frown I could possibly make. Very big frown, very pronounce. Caleb's neck makes contact with one of those metal hoops at 70 miles per hour,

which immediately decapitates them. I mean, I feel like if you hit that, oh my God. How can that be safe? How can hitting that net be safe or those loops to be safe at that fast anyway? It's almost indicative of somebody who has no engineering background, which is a big part of why what happened ended up happening. Oh my God. In addition to this decapitation, one of the women in the raft suffered a broken jaw, the other one had broken bones in her face. I can't even imagine what this scene look like if you're one of these two women in the back of this thing. What does it even look like?

Nope. You're on a raft with a decapitated child. Oh, do they know him? They didn't know him. They didn't know him? It doesn't matter. It's still the decapitated child, whether you know him or not. I'm aware.

I know, I know. But I mean, oh, my God. And then, like, and then I was just doing the man. I was like, where did his head, like, did the head, does his head land? in your lap there's laying on the lap of the girl behind you and then you're writing down with this thing there's there's um there's not videos obviously well actually there is a video but it's not been released publicly um there is images of way after this happened so like five seven 10 eight minutes after this happened because there's police on site and like that's not going to happen super

quick and there's still blood everywhere and this is like a water this is like a water So it's constantly rushing water. There's still streams of blood all of this thing because you just squirt it out like 10 ounces of blood or whatever, how much a 10 year old boy has. So horrible situation. What's really interesting is also this guy's dad was a state representative for Ohio and that becomes critical later as well. So several things are off here.

So the weight distribution was obviously entirely off. like what they should have done if they were going to do this right at all which nobody should have was put the kid in the middle put him in the middle like the two will balance well like mostly even each other out

and then he's just kind of in the middle doing this thing and like you can hold on to them like we went to the water park in New York this summer and Miles was very very small he is and he we were on one where he was like definitely too small to be on but it was like a small thing

we went through a tube we were in like a double person tube and he was below me holding into my feet and I was like you hold onto my feet for fucking life miles and he told me like his little shoulders and i was like oh my god it was very very scary so instilling trust young i like it yeah yeah um the other one is that cal probably shouldn't have been on the ride in the first place so when this thing was in this design and planning stages the people who actually designed this were not engineers but they would consult with engineers every now on them and one thing

engineers told the owners of the water park and the design of the slide was that there should be an age limitation on this and the age limitation they gave him was 16 nobody under 16 should ride this slide and then the owner originally said i don't agree with that i want to set it to 14 and then when the slide opened he removed all limitations completely there's no age limitations the other one was where i mentioned earlier breakmasters should have been installed in the slide were not installed and they would have in theory slowed the slide down so that it could have prevented going airborne the other which is insane is at the time Missouri state law allowed water parks to self-inspect and self-certify that their attractions were safe,

which is like obviously a horrible idea. Oh my God. This most obviously, transparently horrible idea I've ever heard. So, as you can imagine, there's a ton of criminal and civil suits that ended up following after this. The owner of Schlitterbond, the owner of this water park, he was also the contractor. He also owned the construction business that built and designed the Varut. And obviously he came under severe scrutiny. There's a lot behind the scenes here, and I've watched a lot of content around this.

But it's really convoluted. So I'm going to be really the top level overview of it because you bore yourself to that if I gave you every detail. The long and short of it was that in 2012 or so, the Travel Channel had this program called Extreme Parks. And they would go around, they'd review like the craziest rides and all that stuff. This guy, he's the name of Jeff Henry, he's the owner and the designer. he wants to be on extreme parks in his mind he's like the way to do this is to have the most extreme parks so he goes to travel channel and says hey i have an idea for a water slide 17 stories high never been done before no engineer will ever certify it we do an episode on this like yes build in will come and so that was the impetus for this thing so yeah so they said they said they would do it and so now this guy's thinking oh shit now i have to build this thing so it's worth noting Jeff had a high school diploma, zero, zero engineering experience. But once the Travel Channel Express design interest in this, he basically started getting to work trying to build

this thing out. And so again, super combo destroy, but the design phase of the slide was 36 days. So what they did was they built a scale version of this slide at the Texas version of the water park that he owned and they would test there and you can see videos of this you can see videos of this thing going airborne and just flipping left and right they loaded up with 700 pound sandbags and they would go flying like basically what I think what it said was they tested it with humans four times like Jeff Henry himself rode down it four times four times it didn't go airborne and it stayed working as they wanted it to and they're like that's it that's good enough we're ready to go that's when they started breaking ground on

building the actual one on on site in kansas city originally when the travel show said they would do this jeff henry set a timeline of seven months he wanted to have this thing tested designed tested built released in seven months which is insane to think about in the court filing in the criminal case his accomplice and designing this thing was a guy named john schooley he was quoted saying quote if we actually knew how to do this and it could be done that easily it wouldn't be that spectacular so they were legit trial and erroring things they're just testing stuff out and throwing it throwing it at the wall and seeing what would what would stick and what wouldn't stick i mean it's like if you were a child and you were like what do you think we should do for water slide and be like

make it taller yeah that's what it is like a drawing of like a one big loop in a thing like that'd be perfect it's like it's obviously there's no engineers involved or very obviously obviously yeah um and one thing to note is that when they start sort of building this thing and testing this thing out they realized that their designs were flawed at the full scale level and so they would have to keep trying to increase the gradient to slow down the velocity at which you go up that second hill so people would stop flying off and in potentially getting hurt the problem was this thing got so much media attention that they didn't want to show that the thing was faulty and so So because there's always people there trying to film it. And so what they would do is they would do all their testing in the revisions of the slide at night times or in the early morning hours. So fucked up. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't want people to know that they didn't really know what they were doing.

They saw it. And they so like there's, I mean, if I were a lawyer, I'd be like, oh, my God. This is fucking dangerous. Of course. Absolutely. So the slide itself was actually only operational for 182 days, despite the fact that it was around for two years because the thing kept having to get shut down, getting revised. And also, it's a water park, so like most half the year, at least it's shut down anyways. It was operational for 182 days until Caleb went on it and ended up dying.

Again, I went through the court records. Here are the things that nobody would have ever known. If Caleb hadn't died, notice information would have gone out. So there was two people that suffered concussions on this thing. There was one person who suffered a slipped spinal disc. There's two folks who hurt their neck in ways that were not entirely obvious on the court documents. somebody got whiplash there was abrasions and bruising to the head um there was somebody the reporter broke in toes this happened because the restraints on the slide or the raft

failed and the guy had to do what i had to do for that harry potter ride which was just force his feet into the thing so you hold himself in position but at the very end of this slide there's a concrete wall and so this guy slammed into this concrete wall breaking his feet oh my god just throw up you have head lacerations other foot injuries you have herniated spinal disc and then you have the broken jaw the orbital fracture and the decapitation so yeah this is all within 182 days like it's a crazy air rate yeah high air rate oh my god so ultimately uh the family uh calibs family won a 20 million dollar settlement against schlterbonne and jeff was arrested on criminal charges but they eventually dismissed the criminal charges because prosecutors were trying

to present evidence that the they're trying to show the travel channel show is like factual when they filmed it for brooked and they're like yeah this this isn't the standard we want to follow basically the court case the criminal case against them ended up getting dropped entirely Caleb's father as a state representative um went and argued for legislation they removed this self-reporting and self-certification concept um which is great like that's that should have happened that should have happened yeah and they ended up selling a big chunk of schlterban all the parks that ended up getting sold out except for this one because this was a giant liability situation verruc ended up getting knocked down anyways does it doesn't really

matter but jeff continued to prove what an absolute fucking worthless piece of shit he was he ended of getting arrested last year last year he got arrested on possession of meth and he just looks does he just if you've seen a picture is i'm gonna look i didn't look him up but i hate him fine give me the give me show me someone who just makes and sells meth and and also designs insane water slides. It's like, this is the guy. Yep. Oh, God, what a piece of shit.

Yeah, yeah. He ended up getting 36 months of probation, unfortunately. So he's out on the about. And I looked him up on LinkedIn. And he still says that he, his title now is principal at Schlurban. I have no idea what that means. A part of me, Taylor was like, should I reach out with this guy and be like, hey, can I just talk, can I interview you?

Like, what does he say? I don't know, maybe he'll bite. could be fun oh my god so so yeah but the thing the thing notes so the court case that document all this stuff so like that's what i'm saying like these folks really don't want you to know anything that goes on it all gets settled hush-hush right it's like oh you have a herniated this we'll pay your medical expenses also here's like you know 50 000 cash just go just we need to talk about this yeah yeah and so all these rides that you ride like sure you haven't heard of anything bad happening on them that doesn't mean something bad hasn't happened on

them you will never know until a 10-year-old kid is decapitated and then the court case digs up all the records and proves what's happening so 100% anyways have fun uh half the next summer in your amusement parks you know i feel terrible that is so sad i'm so sad for those that poor boy god and those girls she's just yeah no i mean i feel like the biggest thing is all the fucking therapy you have to do for the rest of your whole entire life and you never have you're never going to sleep again so that sucks i i read that one of the women gave an interview and for the life thing i couldn't find that i dug i dug and i could not find where her interview lived um but if anybody knows let us know because that would be amazing to see

poor thing so yeah that's my story for today um hopefully y'all enjoyed it I feel I want to throw up. Taylor, what I was going to do eventually was I was going to, like, do the history of roller coasters and then talk about, like, the scariest roller coasters and then talk about, like, a few incidents with them. And then when I started digging into this, I was like, that is so fucking boring. Like, just talk about the death. That's fair. I mean, I'd like to hear about the history of them sometime. Maybe I'll do that.

You ever seen the sketch of the suicide coaster where it's supposed to kill the occupant? Mm-hmm. That's fun. Yeah. And the idea is that it goes so fast that you die, but you don't really realize it and you just like... Pass out? I mean, I feel like just calm our ways to go.

There was one roller coaster at Dollywood. It was called Flying Eagle or Eagle, Eagle, Eagle something. I don't know what it was, but it was so outlandish. It was the central track, and then your legs are suspended, and it's off the side. It's like above you and below you, there's nothing. there's nothing. And all you can really see is the sky in the ground and it just does a loop after loop after loop.

At one point, it says in the entryway that you will experience four and a half G's, which means like someone like me would weigh, like for a brief instance, like 1,200 pounds. And I'm pretty sure I actually blacked out. Like there was one point when I like, I just kind of like looked around and was like, there was spit all over myself.

And I was like, oh, I just blacked out. I wish I wish you had a video that. I do enjoy watching videos of people on roller coasters when they pass out and then it's like their bodies are just like uh contorting yes which is horrifying why would you do that yeah yeah if you're if you're thrilled see you definitely ride that one because that was like outlandishly terrifying oh my god that's amazing so that's it that's our story is there anything any emails we want to read or we have a couple things that i wanted to share with you one is from me you know um i feel like when we got back from

vacation. Everyone was talking about the documentary on Max about Love Has One. Did you watch it yet? That cult? The cult, the cult where this woman obviously thinks she's God and like she, it's like so dumb. She thinks she's God and

has like a couple followers and they just like really believe it and they believe that she like is guided by all these famous dead celebrities like mostly Robin Williams. And like and then she also, and there's like a whole bunch of people that guided her. And then one of them is Donald Trump, even though he's not dead.

And you're like, okay, that's weird. And then there's like a little bit of, like, there's a little bit of weird racism. You're like, oh, okay, there it is. You know, but she obviously was like, and then she was like selling this like colloidal, colloidal silver stuff. Not colloidal, but you know what I mean? Like the silver that you drink that turns you blue. And she like turned blue and she ended up dying.

And like they kept her body for a few days, like in their place because it's much to her to come back. A lot of things. But she was like one of those people who was like, oh, I'm reincarnated. But I was like all the great people. She said that she was like, Cleopatra. her, Marilyn Monroe, because of course, everybody says that. But I wanted to tell you that at one point in the documentary, they go to Hawaii,

and she decides that she's the reincarnation, and she's also like the volcano goddess Pelle. And they kick her the fuck out of Hawaii. People go to her around the house and they're like, get out of here. How dare you? And they don't even get to see her very long at all. It's amazing because the Hawaiian people are like, fuck you so hard. You're not our goddess. Get out of here.

that's like one of the things I will say that like being like from a culture that just doesn't tolerate nonsense which like is also like the Polynesian way as well um is it's like it's like here it's like I am this thing and you have to look at it and then you're like it's like no get the fuck out of here like who do you think you are just shoot shoot you get out of here immediately so that was lovely I really I enjoyed I enjoyed that kicking her out and then we also have some mail So we have Brad emailed us a couple of things. Is this a thing? Well, one about the farts because they are definitely in that one re-release.

And I heard them and I laughed so hard. And then because I listened to it on the plane and then Brad emailed us about it. So we know that one of our re-releases, there were farts sounds. They came off Taylor's microphone. Did not. We'll never know. Taylor, wait, on the drive home before you go into that, on the flight home from from Asheville, I was in the left seat.

Rachel was in the middle and there was someone on the right. And I swear to God, this guy had to be ripping it every like 10 minutes to the point where the stewardess came by to do like card service. And I was like, hey, someone in this area is like ripping ass every 10 minutes. Do you have any other seats you can put us in? And she was like, the flights totally booked. I'm so sorry. And she was like, can I bring your garbage back to vomit in? And I was like, no, I'm okay. Let's not, I don't need the garbage bag. And then they didn't charge us for wine. And they were like, here, just take it. I was like, okay, this is not. work for it, but so anyways.

Oh, my God, that's so funny. So anyway, we know that happened. Anybody heard that? That's very funny. And then Brad also email us about IQ tests, because he would listen to the one about IQ tests as well. Did you read that email from him? No. Basically, he said, we talked about wondering how IQ is scored,

and he said, far as you have the gist of it, that it should be determined from standardized testing, interpreting, interpreted by a P.D. or a PhD psychologist. The most common IQ test, especially in America, is the Westerler adult intelligence scale. And what it measures is like a huge can of worms and it can mean a bunch of different things. It correlates closely to socioeconomic status, obviously, you know, because people like learn different things via their culture norms and via the way that questions are worded. And you can also like take it over and over again and get better at it.

So it's sort of up in the air about what it actually means, you know? It's fair. It's a good point. Thanks, Brad. Brad, we will, if y'all really want more fart episodes, we'll just do more fart episodes. It's the only choice we got. We could. We could. Cool. Well, that's it. Thank you, Fars. Thanks, everyone. I'm glad to be back. We are at Doom to FailPod at Gmail.com. Doom to Feltop at all social media. Please tell your friends.

Please rate us on Apple Pocket if you haven't. It has a Christmas present to us. It'd be lovely. if you share it. We'd appreciate it. Thank you. Bye all.