The Most Dangerous Water Slides You Never Knew Existed

Dear water park enthusiasts: You've got it all backward. The most dangerous rides in the world aren't the upside-down roller coasters or those rickety, hastily-assembled carnival rides. Nope, they are your favorite rides, the ones that feature wild splash-downs and terrifying manmade waterfalls and so much water going up your nose all day that you could start your own water park. And that's not just a cynical take on it, either. According to NJ.com, you are more likely to get injured on a water slide than on any other kind of amusement park ride.

But wait, water is like a natural cushion, isn't it? Yes, to a point. But the faster you hit the water, the more force it exerts on your body and the less cushioning effect it's going to have. Also, water slides don't have safety bars, their speed is largely based on how much you weigh and what position you put yourself in, and you could drown. So really, compared to a roller coaster, there's not much to recommend them — except for the part where they're super fun and really great on a hot day.

Most water slides are safe. More or less. But some of them are responsible for a constant stream of bumps and bruises and others are responsible for more serious injuries and sometimes even deaths. Here are some of the worst offenders — many of which were so bad they were eventually permanently shut down.

Canada. It's the United States, only way more sensible. Well, most of the time. Someone at the Calypso Water Park didn't get the sensibility memo, evidently, because the park is not only operating a water slide that has proven itself dangerous on a number of occasions, they're also pretending like it isn't dangerous so people will continue to ride it. The Steamer — which the Ottawa Sun describes as "something akin to a toilet bowl" — is one of the most notorious rides at the Calypso Water Park, though it isn't the only one there that has been linked to serious injuries. Steamer riders sit in tubes and then circle a giant funnel before washing into an exit slide. Sounds fun if your inner tube doesn't flip over before you get to the exit.

The park was accused of failing to report injuries on the Steamer to the regulatory body in charge of keeping Ottawa's amusement parks in line. Ultimately, the park was hit with 20 safety violations charges (nine were eventually withdrawn for lack of evidence, per the Ottawa Citizen), and 14 were directly related to three separate incidents that occurred on the Steamer in 2011.

Calypso accepted responsibility graciously, of course, and hahaha no they didn't. In fact they even tried to blame a safety inspector for one of their rides' problems. Don't worry, though, because the Steamer didn't close — if you enjoy a good spinal injury, there's plenty of room for you in line.

Action Park, if you haven't heard of it, was one of the most notorious water parks in the world. It was so notorious it was affectionately known as "Traction Park," or sometimes "Class Action Park." It was so notorious that History says it was shut down in 1996 after a total of six fatalities and so many injuries that no one seems able to actually count them.

Action Park didn't stay closed, though — it reopened in 2010, but instead of expressing remorse for the park's long and sordid history, the owners seemed to embrace it. For a while it was still called "Action Park" and the gift shop even carried T-shirts with the oh-so-adorable slogan, "I survived Action Park." Nothing like a little solemn respect for the families of all the people your rides killed.

Anyway, one of the more notorious Action Park rides is one that closed down relatively recently — it was called Cannonball Falls and it featured a 10-foot drop into a mountain pool. It was the most dangerous water slide in the state of New Jersey, with six injuries during the 2015 season alone. Still, that's tame compared to the overall number of Action Park injuries that season (27), which is tame compared to the number of injuries in 2012 (70). According to NJ.com, Cannonball Falls was permanently closed a few weeks before the end of the 2015 season, so that's something anyway. Sort of.

The Wet 'n Wild Water Park in Orlando is no more, and that means its most notorious water slide has gone the way of things that go into Black Holes.

Many of the park's troubles revolved around a ride called the Black Hole, which the Orlando Business Journal described as "a twisting ride where guests shoot down a dark tube on a two person float." The Black Hole injured one man in 1994 so badly that he sought — and won — a $1.73 million judgment against the amusement park in 2000. The man said he was struck by something in the dark, and when he arrived at the bottom of the slide he couldn't move his legs. Doctors had to insert a titanium plate into his neck.

The park pleaded ignorance, which doesn't seem like an awesome defense. ("We never did safety inspections, your honor, so how would we know there was anything wrong with the ride?") During the trial there were employees who testified that rafts were constantly getting stuck and that attendants would send a new raft into the ride before the first one was confirmed to have exited.

That was probably the Black Hole's worst injury, but there were others, too — tubes sometimes flipped, people fell off, tubes were hit by other tubes — and all this happened mostly in the dark, which must have made it extra-super-sucky. So goodbye Wet 'n Wild and Black Hole, we won't really miss you that much.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the world's most infamous water slide. So infamous that riders had to be hosed down to improve their chances of actually making it to the end. So infamous that even Action Park's most daring adventurers didn't want anything to do with it. So infamous that it closed down after a single season.

This was Cannonball Loop, which frankly looked like an interdimensional hamster habitat. It was long and black and ended with a loop at the end that looked so improbable you had to wonder if it ran on a pact with the devil because it certainly didn't have anything to do with the laws of physics. According to Gizmodo, the Cannonball Loop was opened in the summer of 1985, but it only lasted for around a month before it was shut down by the New Jersey Carnival Amusement Ride Safety Board because all those other crazy Action Park rides were a-okay but this one evidently crossed a line.

So who were the few people insane enough to ride the thing? Mostly Action Park employees, who were given $100 in exchange for maybe never seeing their families again. In Action Park's defense, though, they did send dummies down the thing first. Never mind that some of them came out missing crucial body parts.

One of the most critical safety procedures on any water slide is the one that tells the ride operator when to send the next rider down. Because if the last person hasn't come out the bottom yet, you maybe don't want to send the next one down.

That was the malfunction at the Hawaiian Falls Waterpark in the summer of 2015, when Lauro Castrejon suddenly realized that he was stuck in the middle of a slide. That by itself wasn't especially terrifying until he realized that someone else was coming down the slide behind him and worse, that person was big and picking up speed.

When the second rider slammed into him, Castrejon lost consciousness and woke up again at the bottom of the slide. He was taken to a hospital by ambulance and treated for injuries to his shoulder, head, leg, and back. Castrejon sued the park for $100,000, which included $12,000 in hospital bills. He later told CBS Austin that he thinks the slide should have a light system that lets operators know when a rider has safely exited the pool. "And the fact that they don't have it there I believe is negligent," said his attorney. The current standing of his case is unclear.