Disney & Universal Theme Park Incidents

My Analysis

The first thing I looked at was the top rides based on the number of incidents.

The top four rides in terms of incidents were Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey (44), Space Mountain (39), Expedition Everest (38), and Mission: Space (36). Together these four accounted for about 23% of all 682 incidents, and I wanted to figure out why these they happened.

One thing that I noticed looking at the data was that a large number of incidents noted that the victim had a pre-existing condition that likely contributed to what happened. In fact, 17.1% or roughly 1 out of 6 incidents involved a pre-existing condition. This led me to believe that many of the incidents were not, as expected, due to mechanical failure or anything of that sort, but rather the result of guests' health failing in high intensity situations such as these. See the filtered table below:

Other data also supports my argument, such as the number of incidents involving motion sickness, nausea, or vomiting, which added up to around 9.8% or 1 in 10. Together, incidents from pre-existing conditions or motion sickness (factors which are mostly out of the park engineers' control) make up 26.9% - or 1 in 4.

Why is it that the victims of these incidents often suffer from one health condition or another? I assumed many of the accidents would likely involve reckless teenagers or unaware kids, but in reality the median age was 54, with over half being between 45 and 74 years old. This lined up with my other findings, as if incidents are driven more by underlying health, then it makes sense that they would probably cluster among older guests, whose pre-existing conditions and mobility limitations would make injury more likely.