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Well, it's been a bad week for accident injury on the world's rollercoasters. (Perhaps I should say their safety record is somewhat up and down... or perhaps not.)
Back in my home town of Blackpool, where I spent many a Pleasure Beach ticket before leaving for the bright lights of the no win, no fee compensation sector, there's been a collision on the Big Dipper, as one car crashed into the one in front, which I was always given to believe was impossible. It seems this has resulted in the passengers suffering personal injury to faces, backs and necks, possibly including whiplash.
As if to make the story seem scarier, the Daily Mail has printed a picture of the record-breaking rollercoaster known as the Big Max - it's important to remember that it was not this one, at 215 feet tall, that the accident occurred on, but an older, wooden one of only 60 feet. Not that this should reduce the seriousness of the personal injury suffered - spinal boards were used in the rescue, after all, and one survivor told the press that "One car crashed into the other. We were going quite fast at the time, around 30 miles an hour at a guess."
It looks like the ride had been closed earlier in the day, if the Daily Record is right; the same paper has also claimed that personal injury lawyers were rapidly on the scene and at the hospital that the injured were taken to. (No-one from our firm, I should add.)
And it's not the only such accident; another rollercoaster got jammed, this time in California, leaving the occupants stranded 80 feet above the ground on a hot day. Fortunately, they were not in one of the overhead loops at the time, but it is the second such incident on the same coaster in the past few years. No-one is reported to have suffered personal injury in this accident, unlike the UK one.
But it's not all bad news; there's a feel-good record-breaking story of a man who managed to roller-skate down a roller-coaster track, reaching speeds of 90 miles per hour on the German ride.
The man, described by the Telegraph as an "adrenaline junkie", was fully aware of the risks, telling the paper that "The roller caster is wooden and so unlike rides made from iron and steel there was always a chance of the odd nail or screw that would not be entirely flat. If the skates were to catch a stray nail then I could have fallen and I would almost certainly have died." Like those in the American accident, he escaped personal injury; unlike them, he completed the ride.
And there's also a touching piece in the Mirror about the couples who have fallen in love in the shade of the rollercoasters; I like this particularly because, more than ten years ago, I took the girl I was to marry into the Pleasure Beach as a way of helping her connect with my childhood - and now, from my seat in an office dealing with compensation claims, I feel myself connected with my childhood again, and with that moment of realisation that we were meant to be together. With or without a security bar across our knees.
