You may have seen the recent television documentary, Class Action Park, about an amusement park in New Jersey called Action Park. In that doc, former employees and park guests talk about how dangerous and mis-managed the park was – how many dangerous rides and under-supervised potential accident sites led to countless injuries over the years.
Thankfully, the Cincinnati area’s main amusement park, Kings Island, is infinitely safer. Even back before Paramount owned it (1993-2006), it had more responsible management and more careful safety precautions. The Taft Broadcasting Company opened Kings Island, as an expansion of sorts to a park on the Ohio River called Coney Island.
Kings Island is large, at 364 acres. Usually, however, no park attendees get injured.
One sad day in 1991, however, three people died on the same day, in separate incidents.
In one case, a Toledo woman named Candy Taylor, age 32, fell from the Flight Commander right before the park closed at 10 p.m.
Less than an hour earlier, three men were electrocuted in the pond of the beer garden. The two men who died, 20-year-old William Haithcoat and 20-year-old Darrell Robertson, were trying to rescue a third man who had fallen into the pond. A loose wire under the wire caused their electrocution.
At the time of the Associated Press coverage of the accidents, people interviewed were unclear as to why Taylor fell from the capsule ride. Later it was determined that she was riding solo in a capsule designed for multiple people, and had passed out due to intoxication. A blog about Kings Island goes into greater detail.