Safety vetting essential as rides become more daring

Watching the video of a 10-year-old boy catapulted onto the concrete at one of Dublin, California’s new water slides less than 90 minutes after they first opened, it’s obvious this could have been much worse.

The boy swooped down the steep, three-story-tall chute of the Emerald Plunge and, as it leveled off, slid over the side wall and tumbled across the pavement.

He fortunately walked away, apparently with just scrapes.

The incident, captured on video by our photographer Jose Fajardo, raises questions about whether city officials performed adequate due diligence before opening the $43 million water-theme park known as The Wave. The answer is no. After decades of planning, the city relied on the contractor and the manufacturer to conduct testing of the slides. It never commissioned its own independent expert reviews of their safety.

It’s like a homebuyer who relies on the seller to determine whether the house is structurally sound. Except, in this case, there’s a lot more at stake.

The Wave, a 31,000-squarefoot facility, has been a longtime dream of Dublin leaders, with two full-size pools, an outdoor amphitheater and six water slides hanging from a 48-foot-tall tower.

Two of the six are “speed slides.”

One is the now-infamous Emerald Plunge. In a staff report last month, City Manager Chris Foss described it: “A severe drop induces thrills in this open air ride. Prepare for a rush as you drop three stories at an 80 degree slope.”

State officials now say the angle is 63 degrees, but that’s still a severe incline that should give anyone pause.

It should have prompted extra caution.

But city officials were joining the national quest for the thrill.

According to the World Waterpark Association trade group, there were about 1,300 water parks operating in North America in 2015, up about 30 percent from 2006.

Dublin officials said their slides were built to the manufacturer’s standards.

Never mind that the same manufacturer built the “Banzai Pipeline” at Waterworld Concord, which collapsed in 1997, killing one and injuring 32.

Never mind that the world’s tallest slide, 17 stories high in Kansas City, Kansas, built by another manufacturer, opened in 2014 and closed two years later after a boy was killed and two others injured.

Ken Martin, a Virginiabased amusement park consultant, emphasized to our reporters the continual move by water parks to offer more daring rides.

“We’re starting to push limits when we aren’t completely comfortable in the first place,” Martin said.

All of which should have prompted Dublin officials to hire their own experts rather than relying on the assurances and specifications of the contractor and the company that sold them the slide. They got lucky. No one was killed or seriously injured.

There better not be a next time.