WHO: A Utah Go-Cart track
WHAT: A woman’s long hair got tangled in the moving parts of a go-cart and her hair, scalp, and ear were ripped from her head.
WHERE: WDEF
THE QUOTE: “The owner of the go-cart track says… this was an extremely unfortunate accident that he feels horrible about…He also said the company takes safety of its customers very seriously.”
“Taking it seriously” is a phrase companies use over and over again in public statements whenever they have bad PR. Our series of posts on occurrences of the phrase is our attempt to question how seriously companies are really taking these matters if every time they trot out this phrase by rote.
(Thanks to David!) (Image: CNN)
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Here’s your sign.
@jimharris: Just what the world needs, another ambulance chasing lawyer ushering us into a completely harmless & safe world.
Did your client fail to follow the warning signs too?
@jimharris: Hmmm…specious argument there, bub.
On a personal note, years ago I taught a machine shop class at a local college. An Indian woman (with beautiful long black hair) *almost* get her scalp ripped off while she was cutting threads on a lathe. Had I not been right next to her when her ponytail got caught (and thus able to shut the machine off in a second), it would have been ugly. We had signs about long hair and jewelry; I had warned people the first day of class in the usual safety lecture; a terrible accident could have happened anyways. It wasn’t South Bend (the lathe manufacturer)’s fault, wasn’t mine, wasn’t the college.
Despite our best precautions, users can get careless around powerful machinery and accidents do happen. Go-Karts and lathes need to be a little dangerous, otherwise they wouldn’t work for their intended purpose. The whole point of a kart is that it’s low-to-the-ground, open-wheeled, and cheap to fix and operate. Remove those aspects of a kart, and guess what– you’ve got a car!
Anyways, to end the story: Next class, much to the dismay of her very traditional-minded husband, her hair was very short, a cute bob. She was actually thrilled, she would have never been able to get such a modern ‘do without an extreme excuse.
If this woman had been trying to ride a roller coaster, you can bet she would have been warned and warned again and then not let on the ride if she did not put her hair back. Lawsuits are too common for businesses to not take customer safety seriously.
*ow*.
You know, that’s why it’s always best to keep your hair tied as high up as you can and have no loose clothes when you’re around ROTATING MACHINERY. It’s common sense.
who the hell still rides go-karts? if I want to get the road rage out of my system I’ll go for a drive on the NJ turnpike.
@Shevek: the severity of the injury has nothing to do with how/why it happened. The fact is that there was signage. personal responsibility
Let’s go with your roller coaster, if there was a sign stating that 6’3″ was too tall and you kept measuring everyone over 6′, people would be complaining about that and there would be guys/gals over 6’3″ taking off shoes or slouching to make the requirement. trust me that does happen a lot in reverse with kids that are too short. their parents would help them make the height requirement so they could go on the ride, totally ignoring the fact that the requirement was for the safety of their child.
So who wants to bet that if the owner told her she couldn’t ride the kart because her hair was too long she would have cried discriminaion. I tell ya you just can’t win with people. It wasn’t that long ago when being scalped was not that uncommon, and hell all you had to do to get it then was force some people off the land they lived on for generations. That is an Indi…er I mean Native American joke by the way.
(Devil’s Advocate time) I have to side with common sense on this one. The girl had long hair around moving machinery, unsecured and dangling within reach of the parts on the kart. The operators of the track should have stopped her, handed her a hair net, beret or something to keep her hair from getting caught in it. Or at least warned her verbally of the danger. Lack of common sense and self-preservation is paramount in this matter.
Ouch .
I wish the woman a quick and speedy recovery
it’s 50/50 responsibility folks. Signage is not enough (many adults can’t read) and you have to assume people are retards these days.
WHile the woman should have known better, unless she was a go-kart expert you can’t assume that. Many accidents happen to people because they couldn’t imagine the consequences of an action, or don’t think it will happen to them. This is called, “finding out the hard way”.
Operators are responsible to ensure that rules are enforced.
How many oil stains does that woman have on her clothes from getting caught in car doors? Odds are, plenty.
I don’t know what sort of operation that track was, but every go-kart track I go to has a liability waiver and a set of written rules you have to sit and read before you pay and use it, plus mandatory helmets and jumpsuits (to cover skin and loose clothing). Even if the track doesn’t sit down with you to read it, not going through the procedures is just plain stupid.
This goes beyond plain “common sense” and into self-preservation. I can have no more empathy for that woman than for someone with three foot long hair who drowns after getting caught in a pool drain.
The worst accidents I have ever seen at tracks have always been due to idiocy and inexperience: parents putting their kids on carts with no driving skills (weaving, doing doughnuts in the middle of the track, not looking over their shoulders) and adults who overestimate what they can do and underestimate what the go-kart can do. I have only ever seen one accident due to employee negligence (speeding into the pit lane and rear-ending someone, causing whiplash) and none due to poor maintenance or the type of cart.
@chemmy: Heh. Her sign would read, “I don’t read signs – even this one.”
@jimharris Yeah and how dare they make anything other than 5 star rated mid-side sedan that can’t go over 35 mph. Then no one would EVER get a real injury in a car accident.
And where are the signs on every ring sold and basketball hoop that you can loose your finger if used together.
Should they paint a warning on every piece of ashpalt and cement that you can fall?
Bad (dumb/lazy) consumer, plain and simple. Her comment about “signs aren’t enough” should be read as “I’m stupid and lazy and couldn’t be bothered to read the posted warnings and actually follow them”.
Go Kart = Machinery. You don’t go near machinery with long hair/neckties/loose clothing.
Common sense fail.
“signs, signs, everywhere signs, blocking out the scenery…”
The more signs, the less people will read them because they are ubiquitous.
The thing is gokarts and amusement rides are marketed to the customer as fun amusement devices that have no danger whatsoever. The general public DOES NOT see the danger involved with these amusements, they do not see them as big machines with moving parts, they see them as nothing but fun! Some people here have never experienced the type of clientele these theme parks and family fun centers attract, and some people have. A warning sign is NEVER enough, and the more warnings you have, the more people try to disobey them. The general public almost never takes warning signs seriously. Putting a NO CLIMBING sign on a display in the middle of a park is a great way to get kids to climb all over it. Parents don’t care and they expect the ride operators and theme park staff to babysit their children, but that is irrelevant here.
The gokart track should know this, they should assume that basically everyone is stupid and instruct patrons to put their long hair up before they ride, or else they cannot ride period. The tracks that I have been to are often too quick to shove anyone on the cart without proper instruction or any safety rules at all (even if its a young kid who is unsure if they want to ride or not), and sometimes you cannot hear the OP telling you the safety rules over the roar of all the cart engines. Sometimes they come around and check the seatbelts but thats it.
If they have signs up stating this, then its their job to enforce it. Its not discrimination if they have large signs up about it that the public can easily view, the only thing the employees would be doing by preventing a patron with long hair from riding is enforcing the rule.
@KJones: I haven’t been to this particular track, but I have been to a few in Utah – and I’m guessing regulations here are pretty lax. I’ve only been to go-cart tracks that are at a family fun center, similar to the place she was at – there was no contract, no helmet, no jumpsuit. I put my hair into a multi-banded ponytail and stuck it inside my shirt.
I’m pretty sure even if you put hair as long as hers (mine is only mid-back) into just a ponytail with one rubber band, she could still be at risk for it flying up/out/around (thus why I stuck my hair inside my shirt, which worked pretty well since it was tight enough to hold my hair still…
But don’t assume that they gave her a helmet and a jumpsuit and training – places around here don’t seem to require that sort of thing.
@rhondalicious:
The fun center places here that market to the birthday party crowd are exactly like this, they don’t require helmets, jumpsuits or anything like that, in fact we didn’t even have a simple lapbelt on our gokarts until maybe the mid 90s. Now every gokart has 4 point harnesses thank god, I couldn’t imagine driving a gokart without at least that. I hear the gokarts don’t even have seatbelts in Wisconsin dells but they are quick to throw you off the track if you do anything stupid. The only restriction here is that you must be 54 inches I think, so anyone over 54 inches who goes into one of these places gets quickly shoved into a car without any instruction or maybe something simple, depending on what kind of place you go to. Some are better than others. Hint if you see kids slamming each other when they are parked in the pits of the gokart track, run away fast!
@Lo-Pan:
I think SaraAB86 really said what I was trying to say about the severity of the injury. If I were to go to a go-kart place and see a sign about long hair, it wouldn’t occur to me that the reason was because my hair was possibly going to be ripped out of my head. I would have assumed that these were safe overall–fun for the whole family!–and that possible injuries would be minor. That a serious injury could occur really blows my mind and I think changes this situation.
And I stick by my roller coaster example: if that coaster had only an injury every other month due to customer negligence, I’d bet it would either be shut down, remodeled, or that its owning company would pay an awful lot more attention towards enforcing the rule.
I don’t, by the way, blame the management in this case. The customer didn’t follow the rule. But I had also don’t believe she would have broke it if she had been properly informed of the risks. And it seems to me that it behooves the management to more conscientious with regard to safety.
@rhondalicious: I haven’t been to this particular track, but I have been to a few in Utah – and I’m guessing regulations here are pretty lax. I’ve only been to go-cart tracks that are at a family fun center, similar to the place she was at – there was no contract, no helmet, no jumpsuit. I put my hair into a multi-banded ponytail and stuck it inside my shirt.
That’s part of the problem of some places. As I said before:
[E]very go-kart track I go to has a liability waiver and a set of written rules you have to sit and read before you pay and use it, plus mandatory helmets and jumpsuits (to cover skin and loose clothing).
I wouldn’t go to a track that didn’t have such safety measures (and required close-toed shoes, I forgot to mention). If they don’t have equipment and procedures, odds are the maintenance will also be terrible. It’s like any other product – you wouldn’t eat at a restaurant with rats, so why do something dangerous with no obvious safety measures?
Myself, I’m the wannabe/neverwas type who goes as fast as possible. I’ve had a few crashes (misjudging a corner and getting an eight inch knee bruise and a four day limp from banging the steering wheel) and been the victim of someone else’s stupidity (a kid who saw me and weaved in front of me as I was passing), but I’ve never hit anybody else or caused a crash because I pay attention.
@Shevek: Heh, if a rollercoaster injures anyone in a serious manner (other than bumps, bruises and minor scrapes), it would be shut down, re-inspected and then evaluated. If necessary the manufacturer would issue a service bulletin, and then what would happen is the ride would not be allowed to operate until the service bulletin was satisfied.
There is a certain level of responsibility involved with amusement rides and gokarts (obviously, you shouldn’t make an attempt to jump out of the coaster while its moving, or try to undo the seatbelt, or something similar), but there is a human factor involved in this. Management of the gokart place should have known that people are not capable of following signs these days, how many people have you seen at your local amusement park actually stop and READ the signs, thats right, no one. Its just human nature to ignore these signs. So if there is a real danger the employees should explain this to the customer before riding, this goes for pretty much any amusement. The carnival ride ops here are very good with that, everyone gets verbal instructions about where to sit on the ride and how to behave on it (even if your an adult), and if you don’t follow it, you get thrown off the ride. And YES I have seen many guests get thrown off the rides here, the carnival ride ops here are not afraid to keep their rides safe.
I dunno about anyone else, but if I was holding my kid’s birthday party at a place like this, I would go there before hand and watch their operations to make sure it was safe, its pretty easy to tell when a place cares and when it doesn’t. I wouldn’t want to be responsible if a group of kids got injured. Is the place in question following the posted rules, are there a lot of kids there that don’t know what they are doing, could this be dangerous to the activity, are there teenage ride ops that are doing things other than working when they are supposed to be working etc..
Isadora Duncan.
Lookit up.
I think you’re suppose to type your hair up for these things?
I see a lot of people stressing personal responsibility here. I think that goes for the kart driver, as well as the manufacturer and the person running go kart establishment.
I see a lot of people stressing rules here as well. The ASTM has safety standards for go karts. These rules are supposed to be followed for the safety of people. Most US manufacturers know the rules and follow them. They do so out of a sense of responsibility, because of the horrible injuries that can occur if they do not. They do so because it doesn’t cost any more to put a safe guard over the axle as opposed to just one that is for looks. And they do so because they law requires that they have safety inspections before they rent karts out.
But you see foreign manufacturers who sell karts over here who do not comply with the law and the ASTM standards. And people get hurt.
Shouldn’t the foreign manufacturers of go karts have to follow the same rules as American ones? Shouldn’t they be held responsible when they don’t? And when a business violates the law and doesn’t have safety inspections, and rents foreign made go karts that are unsafe, shouldn’t they also be responsible?
jim harris
jim@phlawfirm.com
Stupid rider, not the track’s fault. People don’t THINK anymore. they just consume. No wonder America is the Fattest nation in the world.