Chris Deaves of Warner Village Theme Parks reports back after representing AALARA at the IAAPA Expo in Bangkok, Thailand, last month. Recently I attended the IAAPA Expo in Bangkok Thailand. Besides the opportunity to attend the networking and information sessions that were available, I was asked to attend the Global Harmonisation meeting that was held on Wednesday, 27th of June.

The Harmonisation initiative is supported by AALARA and Standards Australia of which I am a current committee member for AS3533. The harmonisation initiative is an attempt by members of IAAPA to gain some international consistency in the design, operation and maintenance of amusement rides and devices. A regular questioned asked is what the motives are for such changes, and who will benefit from such an initiative.

The main push for global harmonisation is coming from the larger American companies such as Disney and Universal. As these organisations expand into other countries, they are being asked to modify design and maintenance procedures to comply with the individual country’s standards, which may negate some of the synergistic opportunities of a large organisation’s expansion.

In addition to the problems faced by park operators, manufacturers sell internationally and are constantly required to make changes to equipment design and technical specifications.

The concern with this is that areas of design that may be tried and proven are being changed to comply with a particular standard and may become an untried one-off design unique to that country. In Australia (whilst being addressed), we still have difficulty getting consistency between the states, although this is not an exclusive problem to Australia.

If an international standard is to be developed and does gain acceptance through the various international regulatory and compliance bodies, operators and manufacturers that choose to comply could take comfort in the knowledge that the equipment they are buying or selling will comply with local requirements.

The June meeting was represented by delegates from the USA, Russia, China, India, Europe, UK, Singapore, Thailand and Australia. It is the twelfth such meeting and started with discussions on progress to date.

Chairing the meeting, Greg Hale, of Walt Disney World Resort, explained that IAAPA had approached ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) with the view to develop a formally recognised international document.

After lengthy discussions, it was felt the requirements to develop a Standard through this organisation was currently unachievable, but should remain the ultimate goal. It was at the June meeting that delegates agreed that the harmonisation group should develop an IAAPA document as a resource that can be used as part of a Standards review process by any participating organization, with the hope that each organization or country will closely align with the information in the document. Concerns were expressed at the meeting about using proprietary information from various International Standards and including them in such a document. Further discussions need to be held in this regard.

Previous harmonisation meetings have identified five areas of inconsistency and/or concern that seem to exist internationally over the design of Amusement Rides and Devices. These are restraints, control systems, acceleration limits, guarding and fencing, and risk assessments.

Several delegates have been nominated to benchmark their own Standards against other major International Standards in an attempt to come up with a generic set of guidelines for the IAAPA document. Restraints and Control Systems are being formulated by UK’s Richard Barnes. Richard, was chairman of the EN 13814 Standard of Amusement Rides and Devices and has done extensive work in this area and will be able to copy this work to the delegates.

Disney’s Mike Withers will look at Acceleration Limits and Restraints. Mike has been involved extensively in the work that currently exists in the ASTM standard, some of which Australia has already broadly adopted into its own standard. I will carry out comparisons on Guarding and Fencing; this is probably, technically, the simplest of the outcomes, but it does keep Australia with an active interest in the process. It was decided that developing a generic risk assessment process would be extremely difficult and most processes were consistent enough to give similar outcomes anyway.

There are three harmonisation meetings a year, with AALARA actively supporting the process and managing to have representation at a large percentage of the meetings. Communication and information is now flowing between delegates, with the work progressing this way as well. Whether or not a final ISO document is produced, the process so far has encouraged many countries to research and adopt other countries’ or organisations’ requirements. Parts of AS3533 can now be found in many regulatory documents as we continue to be internationally active in contributing to the state of knowledge in operating and maintaining amusement rides and devices.

The committee responsible for the development of the EN 13814 Standard, released in 2006, no longer convenes and, after taking more than a decade to develop, adoption of this standard is inconsistent and, with no review process on the horizon, it is unknown what level of support this standard will receive.

Whilst in Bangkok, I also happened to have a brief chat with a gentleman who is the president of one of the USA’s major ride manufacturers, as well as vice chairman of ASTM F24 standards committee and a board member of both IAAPA and AIMS. During the course of our conversation, he made mention of the quality and professionalism of Australia’s Amusement Industry - a hard earned reputation we should continue to build on.

Chris Deaves

Engineering Coordinator Warner Village Theme Parks

July 2007