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In
this issue:
(To go directly
to a story, click on a blue keyword below):
The Brain Injury Association gives the industry a clean bill of health;
IALEI's group program gives FECs shelter in a stormy insurance landscape;
Wonderland Sydney expands its "exotic" entertainment;
Oregon Zoo throws out paper in a big way;
U.S. parks wonder if schools will ever end, thanks to snow days;
A Los Angeles Zoo elephant provides local fire and rescue teams rewarding work;
We say 'See ya, neighbor' to Fred Rogers;
We welcome the revolutionary Downtown Aquarium in Houston, we welcome Europe's largest aquarium L'Oceanogràfic of Valencia, and we welcome a Superbowl slide to Switzerland's Aquaparc; and,
We celebrate our own 50th.
For
a printable version of this column,
click
here
For
back issues of THE LOOP,
click
here
For
more information on the facilities and organizations featured in this
newsletter, visit our Connections Page.
click here
Ensuring
insurance
A
surefire way to get mild-mannered park operators cursing is to utter one
word: “insurance.” An article in the upcoming March issue of
Amusement Today delves into the current state of the insurance
industry, which has plagued many small park operators with the fact of
rising rates and the specter of shrinking suppliers.
Ironically, the smallest of amusement operators are relatively incubated
from such woes, thanks in part to the group insurance program run by the
International Association for the Leisure and Entertainment Industry (IALEI).
Of IALEI’s 510 facility operator members, 337 participate in the
program, which provides liability, property and umbrella coverage through
broker Sterling & Sterling, Inc.
“I don’t think there’s any insurance group out there that
hasn’t been affected by the sweeping changes across the insurance
marketplace,” said Ed Pearson, general manager of Castle Park in
Riverside, California, who serves as IALEI treasurer and co-chair of the
Insurance Committee. “Have we fared better than most? I think we
have in that prior to the (rate) increases we were sitting in pretty good
shape for the way our rates were being assessed.” The program has
seen a rate increase in the 35 percent range, said Ray Sjolander, IALEI
director of finance, which is considerably lower than the 50 percent increases
reported elsewhere. Furthermore, because IALEI’s is a group insurance
program, member operators are seeing lower premiums compared to what they
would see if they bought insurance as individual operators.
The biggest boon for those members, however, is that they have access
to insurance, period. The number of members purchasing IALEI’s insurance
has grown 56 percent the past two years. “We attribute that not only
to the merits of the program but the state of the industry and operators
not being able to find coverage on their own,” Pearson said.
IALEI launched its insurance program in 1997. It has now matured to the
point that Sterling & Sterling have enough representative actuarial
data to try to keep its coverage terms and prices competitive. “It
appears to me the program is very successful,” said Wayne Pierce,
an adventure industry lawyer in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-chair of the
IALEI Insurance Committee. “The ultimate proof is that there is a
viable carrier to play ball. A lot of folks can’t get insurance,
and those that do have bone-jarring rate increases.”
When IALEI, formerly the International Association of Family Entertainment
Centers, formed, one of the organization’s major emphasis was to
create group-buying programs for its members. “We thought the insurance
program was the logical way to go,” Pearson said. Other associations
have tried similar programs, and the World Waterpark Association originally
formed explicitly for the purpose of group insurance. Last year, the Australian
Amusement Leisure and Recreation Association formed a group insurance
program predicated on its members earning a certification through prescribed
training (THE LOOP,
June 14, 2002).
Except for AALARA’s fledgling program and IALEI’s mature one,
the rest have faltered. One reason IALEI’s has lasted is its standards
for participation. “A couple of elements we as the administrator
wanted to shy away from because of experience ratings,” Pearson said.
“The two major ones were hard ride parks and water attractions.”
The former is defined as any park with a roller coaster (other than kiddie
coasters), the latter refers to water slides and pools. These standards
negate IALEI’s chief benefit to a segment of the industry the association
is trying to recruit, namely amusement parks with annual attendance of
up to 400,000. Many of those have coasters.
But many also are studying IALEI’s potential and, in particular,
its insurance program, Sjolander said. “The roller coaster will prevent
them from participating in the insurance program,” he said. “At
least for now.”
Tony, the tiger and Juleen are using magic to keep tiger habitats from disappearing. Photo courtesy of Wonderland Sydney.
Illusive
goals
An aspiration
to support wildlife conservation efforts—something that came about
totally by happenstance—is becoming an integral part of the entertainment
offerings of Wonderland Sydney in Australia. Last Saturday the park incorporated
a tiger into its award-winning illusion show, and by the end of the year
Wonderland officials hope to begin displaying non-native animals in its
Wildlife park.
The roots of this effort go back 12 years when Wonderland Sydney, then
six years old, opened its Australian Wildlife Park, an 11-hectare (27
acre) area with some 700 native animals. Then, at the end of 2001, the
Sydney area suffered a series of brush fires, keeping people in their
homes during the Christmas season, a time when Wonderland should have
been enjoying its heftiest gates.
“Because we had no one in the park we sat down as a company and thought,
‘What can we do to help?’” said Renee Ferenc, the park’s
publicity officer. Because the property was surrounded by the fires, Wonderland
offered itself as a rescue center for wildlife caught up in the flames,
and the park became a triage center for veterinarians treating burned
animals. That effort instigated “huge media attention,” Ferenc
said and a resulting flood of donations. “We had people throwing
money at us for the animal rescues, and we didn’t have a foundation
set up to accept their money.”
The park therefore formed the Wonderland Conservation Foundation last
May. For its first campaign the foundation raised $20,000 (US$12,000)
for one of the country’s own endangered animals, the cassowary, a
large, flightless bird that’s universally regarded as the ugliest
fowl on earth.
The new campaign is looking outside the continent by raising funds for
tiger conservation efforts, and for that effort the drive has two key
allies. One, Jonathan Minor, Director of Life Science and the Australian
Wildlife Park, is an American who has established a reputation for bringing
exotic animals to Australian theme parks, including Tiger Island at Dreamworld
in Gold Coast. He joined Wonderland four years ago and started working
on plans to introduce non native animals to the park.
The other ally—rather allies—are Tony and Juleen, who perform
the park’s “Spellbinding Sorcery Illusion Show” and last
fall were named the International Illusionists of The Year (THE
LOOP, November 8, 2002). The two are great admirers of Siegfried and
Roy and had always wanted to include a tiger in their own act. With the
expertise of Minor on hand they have done just that. The new act—in
which Juleen enters a cage and transforms into the tiger—was introduced
to the public February 22, and with it the fund-raising campaign encouraging
guests to drop $1 coins in specially designated boxes.
The act has proved popular in the first week, as has the campaign, Ferenc
said. Juleen especially enjoys the act because in another part of the
show she turns into a snake, and she clearly prefers being a tiger (she
was never transformed into a cassowary, proving that even illusionists
can’t make the truly impossible possible).
Meanwhile, Minor hopes to begin transforming the Wildlife Park’s
collection by the end of the year, Ferenc said. “Now the direction
of the Wildlife Park is to extend it into an exotic display with animals
all over the world that we’re trying to save or promote through conservation,”
she said. “That’s the vision.”
Trash
talk
Whenever Jane
Hartline, the marketing manager of the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon,
visits zoo or county government offices, she strikes fear in the hearts
of the office occupants. “They go, ‘Ohmygosh! Jane’s here,
we’ve got to get paper off the table,'” Hartline said.
Hartline is a member of the Green Team, comprising staff members charged
with developing environmentally friendly initiatives at the zoo. One of
their most ambitious campaigns is to create an entirely paperless operation,
an initiative that Hartline has expanded to the zoo’s governing authority,
the tri-county Metro Regional Government.
“We think the animals need the trees more than we do. That’s
basically where it comes from” Hartline said. “We think because
we think that and we’re in a position to influence a lot of people,
we have to set an example.”
Boy, what an example. The Oregon Zoo is not merely looking at improving
recycling programs and reusing scrap paper; it is looking at ridding itself
of as much as 90 percent of all paper used in its bureaucracy. “We’ve
done a matrix of what it would take to be paperless,” Hartline said.
For instance, “We spend a lot of paper, all of us do, on forms. So,
how do you turn those into paperless processes?” Many forms now move
from department to department electronically, RFPs and contracts are being
converted to e-mail forms using electronic signatures (and then being
stored digitally), and even the entire payroll system, from time sheets
to pay stubs, is converting to digital.
Meetings are now paperless, as the zoo installed wireless connections
in the conference rooms so people can use projectors and their laptop
computers to share documents. Newsletters and staff notices are posted
on an internal web site, as is the employee manual, safety procedures,
internal phone directory and other personnel matter. File cabinet contents
are being transferred to CD-ROM's. Printed resources, such as the Yellow
Pages, are being replaced by on-line sources. Suppliers must agree to
contracts calling for reduced packing material, and staff members are
prompted to make their work stations paperless.
“We want to pick off the low-hanging fruit first,” she said,
noting that the first step was training staff to think of alternatives
to paper and getting them to change habits. “For god’s sake,
people, stop printing your e-mail. If it’s generated on a computer,
it should stay on a computer. Sometimes you take notes and want to think
on paper, so we got some plastic clipboards and you take your stock of
scrap paper and put it face down on that clipboard. There’s no reason
to use legal pads anymore.”
Going paperless would, in the long run, save money, too, Hartline said,
pointing to the Metro generating about 30,000 pieces of paper a month
and spending about $82,000 a year to do so. The initiative also should
improve efficiency, she said, as long as the data is properly organized.
“You can’t have a million icons all over your desktop,”
she said, but she likewise noted that the traditional file cabinet has
always been at the mercy of the filer’s peculiar sense of organization.
Similarly, arguments that electronic files are more prone to being lost
than paper files falter in the face of floods and fire; besides, electronic
files are easier to back up and store off-site (a web site is, effectively,
off site) than are paper files.
Hartline said all organizations have a few “Luddites” who resist
such transitions, but for the most part the staff at Oregon Zoo and the
local governing agency are embracing the paperless ideal. “It’s
kind of like in the old days, you could put a piece of paper in the trash
can and you didn’t feel guilty,” she said. “Today you feel
like a schmuck if you don’t recycle. So how do you get to feel that
way about printing your e-mails? We used to pride ourselves on how many
tons of stuff we recycled. That’s not a good statistic anymore.”
Snow
jobs
Even
in the off-season, parks are worrying about the weather.
That’s because this off-season in the United States, the weather
has been extraordinarily snowy, icy and cold. As winter storm after winter
storm roars across the continent at a pace of twice a week, many schools
that have had to close for “snow days” are looking to extend
their classroom calendars into the summer months to make up the time.
That has amusement parks in the Midwest and Mid-South considering contingency
plans for staffing their operations. “If they extend a week, it will
affect us marginally,” said Vic Nolting, President of Coney Island
in Cincinnati, Ohio. “If it gives way into June, that will be difficult
for us.”
For his park, which employs about 1,000 for the season, the problem is
the number of school districts and their prevailing indecision. Coney
Island hires from 10 school districts and four colleges, and each district
decides individually how it intends to make up its snow days. Options
range from adding minutes to school days, filling in teacher work days,
using part of spring break or adding days onto the end of the year.
“If a third do nothing, and a third extend one week, and a third
extend two weeks, we’ll be fine,” Nolting said. If all extend
one to two weeks, he figures half of his employees would be impacted.
For now, though, Nolting cannot even gauge any scenarios because the school
districts are still debating their courses of action. Parents are even
pushing for decisions, preferring options that will not extend the school
year, Nolting said.
School districts typically build snow days into their academic calendars.
However, schools in Kentucky, for instance, used up those excess days
before the end of January, and some of that state’s districts are
12 days in the hole. Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in Charlotte,
North Carolina, decided to use the President’s Day Holiday as a make-up
day, but an ice storm canceled school that day, too. “For us Southerners,
we’ve had a pretty hard winter,” said Jodie Roberts-Smith, public
relations manager at Paramount’s Carowinds in Charlotte.
She said Carowinds' staff have begun discussing contingencies in case
school years extend, but the situation there is further complicated by
the fact that Carowinds straddles the North Carolina/South Carolina state
line; the park not only draws its employees from multiple school districts,
it draws from two different states with markedly different school calendars.
“It would touch us more if North Carolina has to go later because
they already end closer to our full-time operating season,” Roberts-Smith
said. That full-time season begins with Memorial Day.
Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana, begins its daily operations May
14, before the schools end their years. Traditionally, those May days
challenge staffing needs, said Will Koch, president of Holiday World &
Splashin Safari, which hires 1,050 seasonal employees. “We always
have a hard time staffing those days in May, and if we’ve got five
more of those hard days (because of school extensions) I’m confident
we’ll get through it, but it does put stress on the staff,”
he said.
The schools in Holiday World’s recruiting area were, as of Thursday,
only a couple days in debt. “It’s a small concern for us at
this point,” Koch said. But he also pointed out that yet another
storm, the second this week, was forecast for last evening. “The
bad thing is the storms keep coming through every four days, and we’re
not out of February yet.”
Tara didn't stay down long thanks to the L.A. fire department. Photo by Tad Motoyama/Los Angeles Zoo.
Heavy
duty
Like most
city fire department and rescue crews, the Los Angeles City Fire Department
practices for all the eventualities its trainers can dream up. “We
train for a lot,” said Carl Butler, a battalion chief for the department,
“whether it’s for terrorist activity or hazardous material or
brush fires or ship fires or aircraft accidents. But it’s pretty
hard to train for an elephant down. That’s a toughie.”
Butler’s crew got such a call from the Los Angeles Zoo one Saturday
morning three weeks ago when 8,000-pound African elephant Tara was found
lying down in a pond in her enclosure. The resulting three-hour rescue
earned the fire rescue team a city proclamation February 14 with a certificate
of commendation signed by Mayor James Hahn and the City Council.
The wild-born Tara, estimated to be about 43 years old, came to the Los
Angeles Zoo in 1966. She’s a “very temperamental elephant,”
said Lora LaMarca, the zoo’s marketing and public relations director.
“She is managed under protective contact.” She also has arthritis
in her front legs, and keepers believe she slipped while walking through
her pool. She was found at 7 a.m. February 8, and “all medical indications
showed she had not been down for long,” LaMarca said.
Keepers drained the pool, but Tara still couldn’t get enough leverage
to pull herself up. The zoo then called for help, the fire department’s
heavy rescue team. “We’ve had equine rescues in the Griffith
Park area (the Zoo’s location) with equine falling into ravines,”
Butler said. “As far as pachyderms, though, this was a first.”
Rescue crews, by training, work methodically, even in life-threatening
situations, as was this one: Tara was susceptible to internal injuries
from the sheer weight of organs compressing against each other. Because
the pool did not allow enough space to manipulate equipment, the rescuers
placed heavy straps on Tara and pulled her out onto the yard. Once there,
the crews used a forklift to lift her head and try to prod her to her
feet, but she still couldn’t get up. So, the rescue team lifted her
with a crane. Three hours after she was found down, Tara was on her feet.
The rescue crew liaisoned with the zoo’s veterinarians throughout
the operation as well as with the keepers to make sure neither the zoo
staff nor rescue workers were put in danger. Butler described the rescue
as “quite a production” but nothing his crew couldn’t handle,
even if they had never trained to lift pachyderms. “Our people are
technically proficient,” he said. “You had a very experienced
and proficient crew come in. They know where to place the pulleys, they
know where to place the straps. Experience and training were the key to
that, not from zoo operations but from other emergency operations we’re
exposed to being in a big city.”
But when you pull a tractor-trailer back from a bridge precipice, the
truck doesn’t have an inclination to attack its rescuers. Tara at
least remained docile throughout the operation. Then, with the yard cleared
of everybody else, head keeper Jeff Briscoe used a long pole to remove
the last strap from Tara’s body. “Jeff finally gets it off,
it falls to the ground, she lets out this big bellow and races around
the yard. Jeff just took off,” LaMarca said. Butler described the
scene as a bull chasing a matador over the fence in a bullfight ring.
“Then she started to eat and everybody said, ‘She’s definitely
back on her feet,’” he said.
Mr. Rogers gave Idlewild a ride for the ages. Photo courtesy of www.idlewild.com/homekw.cfm
Hug
and song
Two summers
ago on a visit to Idlewild Amusement Park in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, I
sent my two sons, then ages 14 and 12, out to play in the park while I
produced that week’s issue of THE LOOP. I made one demand of Ian,
my youngest: he must ride Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Ian was
even then saying he wanted to be a ride designer when he grew up, and
I thought he should therefore experience the perfect amusement park ride.
How is it perfect? Sure, it’s a corny tale told by stilted animatronics
to passengers on a plodding trolley. Yet, every trolley concludes its
route with every passenger—pairs of parents and children—loudly
reciting “Come along, come along, to the Hug and Sing-along,”
the ride's repeated refrain. For its targeted audience, Mr. Rogers'
Neighborhood always delivers, and every passenger disembarks with
an experience indelibly imprinted in their reminiscence. Furthermore,
that experience is inevitably shared with a loved one, be it a child,
grandchild, or spouse. When Ian returned to the park office I looked at
him and said, “Well?” This too-cool-for-school teen shook his
head and merely said, “Come along, come along, to the hug and sing-along.”
Fred Rogers, who died Thursday at the age of 74, played an active role
in the design of the only amusement park ride in the world gleaned off
his show, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” that has run on
American television for 40 years. A native of nearby Latrobe, Pennsylvania,
Mr. Rogers expressed fond memories of the amusement grove he visited as
a child. He chose to put his ride there not only out of loyalty but because
he felt the quiet, family-oriented Idlewild was the best match for "Mr.
Rogers’ Neighborhood," a children’s show that stood out
among the rest for its slow pace, comforting tone and persistent message
of brotherhood.
Rogers died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after a brief battle with stomach
cancer, according to news reports. His last public appearance was January
1 when he served as a Grand Marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade
in Pasadena, California. In that parade the car in which he rode with
Bill Cosby and Art Linkletter traveled behind the Give Kids The World
float.
Our industry has lost a friend, a partner, an inspirer.
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Landry's lit up Houston—and an entire industry—with its new aquarium. Photo by F. Carter Smith. It’s
an aquarium! In size, structure and senses, Valencia's new aquarium wowed first-time guests. Photos courtesy of Parques Reunidos Group. It’s
an aquarium! Mister Switzerland took a spin on Aquaparc's newest slide. Photo courtesy of Grévin & Cie. It’s
a water slide!
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No-brainer
redux
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Feeling
50 THE LOOP is written and produced by Eric Minton, Minton Enterprises, LLC. To see more examples of Eric Minton's work and Minton Enterprises services, visit www.ericminton.com.
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