问答题 Every year, new roller coasters are built that are bigger, faster, and wilder than ever. Tower rides are dropping us farther. Flat rides are spinning us with unimaginable new twists. It all seemed like good clean fun until June 2,2001. A 28-year-old woman was found unconscious after a three-minute ride on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. Paramedics rushed her to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The Los Angeles County coroner attributed her death to a pre-existing condition. The woman had a brain aneurysm that could have broken at any time.
Rather than calm people, the coroner"s ruling created a controversy that may continue for years to come. The death was one of fifteen fatalities or serious brain injuries that had occurred over the prior ten years among otherwise healthy people who had just taken thrill rides.
By the tens of thousands, children and adults line up for thrill rides in amusement parks around the world. These rides are designed to provide the extreme physical sensations you just don"t get walking down the street. To find out whether riders need to be as fit as jet pilots to handle the thrills, popular mechanics asked one of the people best qualified to answer, Captain David L. Steinhister. He is a flight surgeon for the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. "We fly visiting media representatives, who are everyday people, in our jets and subject them to g-forces in excess of those found on roller coasters. We have not had any instances of brain trauma," Steinhister said. "As flier, we train to handle and tolerate the heavy g-forces, as high as nine g"s. Our visitors will experience sustained g-forces of more than twice the forces found on a roller coaster with no lasting ill effect." But Steinhister adds that they always screen these people prior to flights to be sure they"re healthy.
Would Air Force-style preflight medical screening have saved any of those who died soon after coaster rides? That will remain a matter of speculation, but it does raise the question of whether more regulations are needed on thrill rides. The amusement industry doesn"t think so, and the scientific evidence that exists appears to concur.
The latest evidence to support the amusement industry"s position appeared in the October 2002 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma . University of Pennsylvania scientists Dr. Douglas H. Smith and David F. Meaney coauthored the article, "G-force, Roller Coaster and Brain Trauma: On the Wrong Track?" Smith is a brain trauma researcher who studies the effects of automobile crashes. Meaney is a bioengineer who studies brain trauma.
"According to our data," says Smith, "it"s unlikely that amusement rides cause brain injuries." The team took g-force data from three high-g-force roller coasters and input the data into a mathematical model for head accelerations. They then compared the results to known thresholds for various types of head injuries. They found that the highest head accelerations from roller coaster rides were far below the minimum thresholds for other types of injuries.