Millions of people visit and enjoy amusement parks every year. Of these millions of visitors, a few thousand will sustain some form of injury during their visit. While this does make for only a small percentage of the people that visit these parks, the injuries tend to be very serious.
What causes amusement park accidents?
When it comes to injuries at an amusement park or a mobile attraction, it can be difficult to sort out exactly who is responsible for causing the injuries. Most claimants will need the assistance of a Whittier amusement park injury attorney to investigate the cause, find the parties that are liable and to recover compensation for the damages. The following are some of the factors that can lead to an amusement park injury:
- Negligent behavior of park employees
- Insufficient maintenance
- Design flaws in rides
- Failure to properly warn or instruct visitors
Rider non-compliance
With many amusement park injuries, one of the contributing factors may be the failure of a rider to comply with the safety rules or instructions from the park staff. If this is the case, the park will certainly raise this issue in their defense. While this defense may be successful in reducing or eliminating the liability of the park, it does not always mean that all of the fault for the injury automatically goes to the rider.
As an example, many rides have minimum height requirements for the riders. The guests of a park are expected to abide by these warnings, but some level of responsibility does belong to the park. If there is a height or weight limit for a ride, the park needs to make sure that visitors are aware of the limit and they should have staff members monitoring the ride to ensure that the rules are followed.
The issue of rider compliance is just one way in which a park may try to defend itself against an injury claim. Additional legal issues may come into play depending on the circumstances of the injury. An experienced personal injury lawyer will understand all of these potential issues and take steps either to ensure that they are an ineffective means of defense for the park or to mitigate the effects that a particular strategy will have on the claim.
Find out more
Amusement park injury claims are somewhat complicated and each case will have its own issues to deal with. For more information about what you can do about your claim and how we can help, contact the Whittier amusement park injury attorneys at the Quirk Law Group.