Police are now saying the young boy who died on the water slide suffered a fatal neck injury.
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Caleb Schwab died Sunday on a slide at the Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City.
“This is not something we’ve experienced”, she said, adding that the park and the ride were closed pending the investigation. He hopes Kansas will make changes to the way the state inspects rides. The commission used to oversee fixed rides, but Congress stripped it of this power in 1981.
When a KDOL inspector visited the park in 2012, he was told by Schlitterbahn’s resident inspector that nondestructive testing – or NDT – data wasn’t available. Inspectors only need to look at rides once a year too, Martin said, and when incidents do occur, there is no information sharing mechanism.
The incident is still being investigated by the Kansas City, Kansas police department.
“We definitely are always looking out for the children in our park”, Public Relations Director Amy Gazin says. If the water park’s operators are found to have violated the Kansas Amusement Ride Act by operating Verruckt without proper inspections, they could face misdemeanor charges, according to the state statute.
He says he saw the family Sunday morning at church before they left for Schlitterbahn.
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The following day, the official cause of death was ruled to be a neck injury, reports Fox News.
The slide’s 2014 opening was delayed a few times, though the operators did not provide reasons for the delays. 7, 2016, while riding the Verruckt, a water slide that’s bille.
The Verrückt, which when translated from its German origin means “insane” or “crazy”, opened in July 2014 and was declared by the Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest water slide. Passengers then are “blasted back up a second massive hill and then sent down yet another gut wrenching 50 foot drop”, the website adds.
“It’s like jumping off the Empire State Building”.
Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry told USA Today that he and senior designer John Schooley had based their calculations for the slide on rollercoasters.
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In an email Monday, Winter Prosapio, spokeswoman for Schlitterbahn, said the park would not be “participating in any further media interviews at this time”.
