Are our fair rides safe?

As families head to their local parish festival or county fair this weekend, many may be wondering if the rides are safe in the wake of the fatal accident at the Ohio State Fair on Wednesday.

Answers to their questions may not provide a lot of comfort. While deaths are rare, many experts and watchdogs say both Ohio and Kentucky have too few regulations and too few inspectors to enforce them. 

A young U.S. Marines recruit died and seven people were injured Wednesday while riding the Fire Ball. The accident and subsequent investigations shine a spotlight on the patchwork system of regulation throughout the rest of the U.S, they say. 

"It's scary, isn't it ... and it's messy," said Mark Hanlon, a Los Angeles-based engineer who works extensively with the amusement ride industry. "Every state has their own regulation ... and a lot of them don't have much.

"When it comes to Ohio, do the math and look at how many hours do they get to do real inspections." 

Ohio has eight rides inspectors

Ohio currently has eight inspectors to check amusement rides annually and do spot checks around the state – on-site inspections of how rides are set up and how operators are working the rides. Those inspectors issued more than 3,700 annual permits in 2015, the most recent year for which numbers are available.

Hanlon says a good inspection takes one to three days and should include X-rays of welds and joints. It's unclear how many state inspections in Ohio go to those lengths.

Officials with the state's Agriculture Department also couldn't say how many actual inspections were conducted.

The number of inspectors hasn't changed since 2009, when The Enquirer last reported on the issue. Yet the number of permitted rides has climbed 23 percent statewide in that time. 

Kentucky has nine inspectors compared with eight in 2009. The team did more than 3,000 inspections last year, and issued nearly 700 permits.

That's compared with about 2,200 inspections/permits eight years ago.

In both states, any ride needs to be inspected at least once to receive an annual permit. Fines for violations can reach $10,000 in Kentucky and $5,000 in Ohio.

There are no written training requirements for ride inspectors for Ohio, although both states send inspectors to training by the National Association of Amusement Ride Safety Officials (NAARSO).

The Ohio Agriculture Department declined to provide anyone for an interview for this story. 

Chad Halsey, branch manager for amusement rides for the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, said that all his inspectors are required to be NAARSO certified and receive 32 hours of training every two years.

The department also said that Kentucky state inspectors would be on hand to "thoroughly" go over the rides at the Kentucky State Fair on Aug. 17-27 in Louisville.

• More: How will Greater Cincinnati fairs, festivals change?

• More: How a day at the Ohio State Fair turned tragic

• More: University of Cincinnati student among those injured

Industry officials say that rides are safe, and that state regulators do a good job at keeping operators on their toes – even while acknowledging the inconsistent standards around the country.

"What happened in Columbus was tragic, yes, but it is a very rare event for us," said Bob Johnson, president of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association, the Florida-based trade group representing operators of rides that move from place to place.

"We work very hard with other organizations, manufacturers and our owner/operator members to raise the safety bar," Johnson said. "The owners are the ones with the most at stake, after all. These are family-owned businesses for the most part, and the last thing they want to do is hurt someone."

Several local ride operators did not return messages from The Enquirer.

Inspections vary from state to state

The sparse number of inspectors and low fine levels are par for the course for much of the country, experts say.

In some places, the oversight is even less, while California, New Jersey and Florida are cited as having very tough safety standards.

In California, for example, the ride inspection agency is completely self-sustaining through inspection fees and fines.

But in Texas, there is very little regulation – even less than in Ohio or Kentucky, they say.

"This is really tragic because I know some of these guys, but it still shows how inconsistent it can be," said Ken Martin, an amusement ride safety analyst and inspector from Richmond, Va. "What happened in Ohio this week shows the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this stuff."

Martin says that the industry and state regulators often have a cozy relationship, with some former officials moving into private inspecting businesses or even into jobs with bigger ride operators.

"There's a lot of sleeping together that goes on in this industry," Martin said.

Johnson, who chairs Florida's amusement ride advisory council, denied that.

He acknowledged that industry officials work "closely" with state legislators and regulators but that "we are always working to encourage higher safety levels."

No changes in Ohio rules in years

The current state-by-state system began in the 1980s, when Congress turned over regulation of amusement parks and then mobile ride operators to states. That left officials in Ohio and elsewhere scrambling to create standards. There have been a few recommended inspection standards created since. But many states don't follow those closely or only use parts of those recommendations.

Ohio's rules haven't changed much at all since the 1990s, even though there have been several serious accidents since 2000, including:

• The 2003 death of Greyson Yoe by electrocution from an improperly wired bumper car ride at the Lake County Fair. Courts eventually found the Ohio Agriculture Department liable for the death, which also led to several criminal convictions.
• The collapse of an inflatable slide outside the Cleveland Indians' Progressive Field in 2010 that led to the death of a Pennsylvania man. A followup investigation showed that state officials failed to inspect the ride when it was fully inflated.
• In 2011, Dr. Amgad William Abdou was paralyzed after falling on a ride at an indoor inflatable park called Pump It Up in Cleveland. It was later discovered that state inspectors did not fully check whether park employees knew how to instruct patrons on safety.
• Another inflatable slide blew over in Middletown in 2009, throwing several people from the top and causing significant injury.

The most recent significant change to Ohio regulations came in 2014, when the fine schedule was relaxed to a sliding scale from a straight $5,000 per offense.

At the Ohio State Fair, all rides were shut down Thursday on the orders of Gov. John Kasich, a decision watchdogs applauded.

"That was the best thing that could have happened, and maybe this will lead to a closer examination of what goes on there in Ohio," Martin said.

Amusement ride industry official Johnson said that he would welcome tighter regulation were Ohio to move toward that.

Accidents have prompted action elsewhere.

Kansas earlier this year voted to toughen its rules following the death of the son of a state legislator there. But lawmakers also voted to delay implementation of the new law until next year.

Hanlon said that overall, the current system relies too much on owners "self-policing." But he agrees that can make some ride companies safer.

"I am not really worried about the smaller mom-and-pops that do a lot of these fairs, festivals and carnivals," Hanlon said. "They really take pride in this. That being said, we could do a lot better job watching over them."