The Dark Side of Orlando Theme Parks

Some people casually enjoy amusement parks. Others might be “enthusiasts” or “Disney adults”. I prefer identifying as an unabashed theme park nerd. I watch POV YouTube videos of people riding rollercoasters from around the world to relax. I’ve listened to more than 14 hours of a podcast series exclusively dedicated to the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney. I once won an entire trivia round where I identified the park attraction based on hearing 10 seconds of the ride’s audio. The joy of theme parks in particular, however, also comes with an uncomfortable price–bad stuff happens inside them, especially when it comes to ride safety! Not one to shy away from especially morbid trivia, I was thrilled to find that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has been collecting records of accidents in major Orlando theme parks in a very obscure quarterly report for decades. Known as the “Memorandum of Understanding” Exempt Facilities Report, the department logs any deaths or injuries that require a hospital stay of at least 24 hours connected to an attraction across Walt Disney World, Universal, SeaWorld, Legoland and Busch Gardens. Weird data? Horrible, oddly-specific injuries? Floridian Word documents masquerading as PDFs?? Yes, please!

‘What a fun first topic for this newsletter,’ I thought, extremely naively, last summer. Shortly after the summer opening of Universal’s brand new park, Epic Universe, a 32-year-old man horrifically died after riding one of its new coasters, Stardust Racers. Deaths from riding attractions in these parks are exceedingly rare, but this incident (which was ultimately determined to be “an accident”), along with a few other recent tragedies, left me feeling like it would actually be worthwhile to assemble these report records into a database to analyze.

This data is easily accessible and updated at this public PDF link, but I quickly realized that turning this document into clean data would be much more of a feat than planned [more of Caitlin’s naïveté exposed].

The 50+ page document lists incidents by date and park, organized chronologically by quarter going all the way back to late 2001. It’s a huge amount of information, but that time frame generates weird quirks as the way in which data was entered both stylistically and with respect to the content itself has clearly changed over time. Getting this PDF–which is really just a strangely formatted Word document that has elements of being a table–into something I could analyze was the first hurdle. Once I went through the process of first coding to translate the data from a if-you-squint-this-is-a-spreadsheet Word format into an actual dataframe with my weapon of choice, R, I then had to (1) manually fix all the fun ways each ride could be spelled over 20+ years of data entry, and (2) categorize the rides into individual parks for Disney World and Universal Orlando, which each span several large theme parks and water parks.

There were no less than TWENTY different spellings for the Aerosmith themed Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios theme park. Many attractions in this dataset have come and gone over the years, and this one sadly also was just reskinned as a Muppets coaster. I liked to refer to this ride as the “let’s realign my spine” coaster, so I can see why it regularly appeared on the list.

I first took a look at how many incidents were even being logged at all by the parks. Unsurprisingly, Disney and Universal, as the biggest players in the Orlando theme park scene, generated the bulk of reports, with smaller parks having fewer rides to report incidents from. The 2010s were a particularly bad time for incidents in the parks! The decade marked a huge expansion for Universal with the addition of the Wizarding World to its parks. At the same time, Disney expanded Fantasyland in Magic Kingdom while Bob Iger was snapping up assorted IPs to embellish the parks.

The water park Wet ‘n Wild, while owned by Universal, was logged separately in the reports–it was closed in 2016 and featured the infamous Der Stuka freefall slide. As a firm believer that water parks are death traps, I can’t say I experienced this ride, but this Redditor sure did:

To make sure I was controlling for how many more attractions are inside of Disney,  I looked at the “rate” of incidents–ie. the number of incidents reported per attraction–at both Disney World and Universal parks.

Disney has overshadowed Universal in size and scale for most of its history in Orlando, but Universal is now a serious competitor and is typically known for having a higher proportion of thrill rides, including more intense rollercoasters. Even when I normalized for the number of rides, Disney had more than twice the incidents per ride as Universal did in an especially rough year for safety, 2015. And the four major individual Disney Parks, Animal Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom all regularly had higher numbers of incidents reported than any of the two Universal parks. Magic Kingdom has a higher daily attendance than any other park but Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure and now Epic Universe all now rival Disney’s crowds.

That trend might change with the new rides at Epic Universe–it smashed into the world with nine incidents last year–and the expansion of Harry Potter lands across Universal parks, however, as its first major HP attraction, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is the ride with the most incidents reported in the data! It also features a similar ride system to the new Monsters Unchained dark ride in the part of Epic devoted to Universal’s classic monsters. With the exception of Revenge of the Mummy (the dialogue of which I can recite verbatim) and The Incredible Hulk Coaster, Disney operates the rest of the top offending rides.

What is actually happening to people on these rides? These are all supposed to be incidents that involve a hospitalization, so they have to be serious. Many involve people falling while getting off a ride vehicle. Others refer vaguely to loss of consciousness. And some are genuinely horrifically graphic to imagine (I once again blame water parks for some of the gnarliest accidents). One 27-year-old even went into labor after exiting the Tomorrowland Speedway. I ran the injury reports through a custom LLM-powered classifier I built to sort out the dizzy spells from the loss of limbs from the many other ailments. Fainting (often described as syncope) and dizziness were the most common events, followed by seizures and musculoskeletal injuries (often associated with falls). Heart attacks, strokes and severe physical injuries were less common but still regularly pop up over the years.

I also found it especially, uh, interesting that the phrase “pre-existing condition” appeared OFTEN in these reports. Ever litigious Disney used "preexisting" in 27% of their accident reports, compared to just 11% for Universal. How a theme park worker describes an incident can deviate significantly from the sometimes extremely vague description in this data. When a British tourist put his hand in the water during a drop on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Magic Kingdom he apparently lost several fingers to the machinery under the boat. One former cast member alleged that Disney workers put hot dogs on sticks into the water as a “test” before they reopened the ride. This 2014 incident was described succinctly as “lacerated tips of 2 fingers” in the MOU report…OK!

Let me know if you have thoughts or questions on this particularly gnarly data! If you’re a current or former theme park worker, definitely reach out to me with your stories of park accidents at [email protected] or Bluesky. 

You can find all the code and cleaned up data I used here!