By Margaret Harris
A couple of years ago, I came across what I thought was a funny (and physics-related) video about a water slide. The slide is called “Verrückt”, which my German-speaking colleagues translate as “mad” or “crazy”, and it caught my attention because it was being built at an amusement park in my home town of Kansas City. As the video shows, the slide experienced a few problems during its testing phase.
“When the rafts are loaded with more than 1000 pounds, the slide becomes unsafe,” says the video’s announcer as the test raft goes airborne. “We’re going to have to redesign the entire slide,” an unnamed official adds.
The redesigned slide opened in the summer of 2014 and operated under strict weight limits. The combined weight of riders on the three-person rafts had to be between 400 and 550 pounds (180–250 kg), and the amusement park, Schlitterbahn, established a procedure for weighing riders beforehand to ensure the limits were adhered to.
But on Sunday, something went wrong, and a 10-year-old boy called Caleb Schwab – the son of a Kansas state lawmaker – died.
The cause of Schwab’s death is still being investigated, so it’s not known whether the Verrückt’s tight weight restrictions or its testing-phase troubles had any bearing on the accident. According to reports in the local newspaper, the Kansas City Star, officials were unable to say “whether the boy fell from the slide or was even aboard a raft when fatally injured”.
We’ll probably learn more in the next few days. Until then, though, the test video is a sobering reminder of why it’s important to get the physics right.
