i’ve seen a lot of really messed up images in my time on the internet, weird fetish shit, even a few IRL gore images but nothing. NOTHING evokes such a deep seated, gut wrenching fear in me like this image of the fucking water slide from Action Park with the loop in it
FUCKING ACTION PARK.
Nicknamed Traction Park by employees, this amusement park used to be in New Jersey, because of course it’s from New fucking Jersey. It was open for twenty years and during those years had six deaths and countless, COUNTLESS injuries because of shit like this. The entire Wikipedia article on Action Park is just thinly veiled sarcasm about what a shitshow this place was, I highly encourage a read-through sometime, but I wanna share some of my favorite facts.
The park’s alpine slide led to 14 fractures and 26 head injuries in the years 1984 and 1985 alone. They briefly had a skate park but it was so poorly designed that after a single season they filled it up with dirt and pretended it never existed. The go-kart style rides’ speed limits were easily circumvented by the seemingly indifferent park staff so these motherfuckers could go up to thirty miles per hour above their intended speed limit. The tank ride had tennis ball cannons which patrons used to harass any worker unfortunate enough to have to attend to a broken down tank.
Oh, but don’t worry, Action Park had gentler attractions too – like the speedboat ride set up in a pond known to be infested with snakes. Or the bumper boats that had a tendency to fucking leak gasoline.
A large portion of the head injuries and deaths at Traction Park came from the water park, where, you guessed it, the above abomination, the looped water slide, was. NOBODY on the staff wanted to test this thing out. People were offered a hundred dollars to do it and still declined. The slide was open for A MONTH before safety officials stepped in and said “Hey, not cool”. People had to follow strict safety procedures to ride this thing and they still had people get stuck in the loop, and they eventually needed to add an emergency escape hatch because of it.
Oh yeah! The park also sold alcohol liberally. Many, many of the injured people here had alcohol in their system, big surprise. The entire park was staffed by teenagers who were probably overworked and underpaid and definitely unprepared to maintain a death trap like this. The place was run by seemingly indifferent higher-ups who made little effort to make the place safe for human inhabitancy. The park was fined only once during its hot, hot mess of a run. After almost twenty years of lethal New Jersey holidays for the whole family, God finally stepped in and Class Action Park was shut down. Attempts to reopen the park with much, much, MUCH stricter safety regulations in 2013-14 ultimately failed, for reasons absolutely beyond me.
Action Park will never not be the most horrifically hilarious thing to me and I hope to god the rest of the world will one day know and empathize with my feelings on this place.
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