Teen ran the Tower of Power

The saga of amazing greed in the fen-phen case (click here for the latest story) could be subtitled, "Personal injury lawyers gone wild."

But sometimes you find circumstances that cry out for an ornery p.i. lawyer to administer some serious legal consequences.

At least that was my conclusion after reading today's Courier-Journal article on the release of new witness statements in the lawsuit against Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom near Louisville. Thirteen-year-old Kaitlyn Lassiter's feet were severed last summer after a cable snapped on the park's Superman Tower of Power ride. According to witnesses, the emergency stop button wasn't pushed in time to stop the ride before it dropped, and the broken cable started whipping around, severing her feet.

It turns out, if the depositions are accurate, that one of the ride operators was a 16-year-old girl who was being paid $5.15 an hour and had worked there for three weeks. She said she was too far away from the emergency stop button to react fast enough.

According to the C-J, "the Superman Tower of Power, formerly known as 'Hellevator,' lifted passengers 177 feet, then dropped them at speeds of more than 50 mph."

Beyond any maintenance or product defect issues, maybe it's not a good idea for the operators of such rides to be kids with three weeks on the job being paid at or near the minimum wage.

And I try to picture how I would feel if I were the ride operator, and that happened while I was on duty. Then I picture my daughter, who is almost 16, being put in that type of position and living with guilt the rest of her life. Not surprisingly, the young ride operator quit her job a few weeks later. Kaitlyn Lassiter isn't the only teenage victim of what went wrong on that ride that day.