Amusement Park Accidents: Harvest Carnivals and Bad Bounces

Harvest carnivals are thrilling for children, and as parents we enjoy watching our little ones have a great time. There are costumes and candy and wonderful games, just like when we were kids. But times change, and there are new things to do every year. One of the most popular and common of these relatively new activities is the bounce house.

There’s no denying that bounce houses can be a lot of fun, and children flock to them whenever they are available. Unfortunately, many of these Fall carnivals are set up by people who don’t really know what they are doing. Bounce houses are not particularly safe under the best of circumstances, but when you combine those dangers with the inexperience of the people in charge, you have a recipe for disaster.

An unsettling story out of New Hampshire calls to mind just how bad things can happen when these circumstances converge. Two toddlers were injured, one critically, when the bounce house they were playing in was picked up by heavy winds and tossed into a nearby orchard.

The sequence of events that led up to these terrible injuries is startling because there were so many opportunities to prevent it, including:

• Judging the winds to determine whether it was safe to operate a bounce house
• Properly tying down the house if conditions warranted its use
• Positioning the bounce house such that heavy winds were not directly buffeting it
• Maintaining proper supervision of the toddlers so that they didn’t have access to the bounce house

The operators of the event maintain that the bounce house was not supposed to be accessible, which begs the question as to why it was even inflated. When bad things like this happen, excuses become prevalent. If you or someone you love has been injured in an accident, please contact a lawyer to help you cut through the excuses.