Posted On: August 30, 2004, 3:02 pm CDT

Posted By: Kathy

When a tubing facility invites participants to snow tube at its facility and builds it in such a negligent manner that the specifications of the facility itself create serious accidents and then the facility attempts to hides behind liability waivers... please consider who is really shirking their responsibility.

People go to these facilities thinking that they are designed safely. You cannot steer or control the speed of a tube once you start down a run. The facilities should have a responsibility to design the run so that a reasonable person, being reasonably prudent, would not face a life-time of disability or worse because of the facility's desire to make more money at the expense of safety and then turn around and attempt to hide behind skier laws and liability waivers.

Skier laws were created to hold skiers accountable for how they control themselves on the slopes. Skiers CAN control themselves on the slopes and generally should be held accountable for their decisions regarding speed and direction. However, tubers have NO control over their speed OR direction once the tube is in motion. They are at the mercy of the facility design.


The design of the facility in the NH case was apparently very faulty in that it did not providing spacing between run-off areas to prevent tubers from rebounding backwards and crashing into another tuber going in the opposite direction.

If a county designed a road that suddenly pitted drivers in the opposite direction against each other competing for a single lane, who is negligent? The first time users of that road who suddenly faces unexpected peril or the county that was negligent in the design of the road?

If you nearly died in front of your children, spent almost two weeks in the hospital, and suffered a life-long injury because (on the first ride down, btw) the tubing facility was grossly negligent in the design and operation of its facility, perhaps you would feel differently about who is being irresponsible.

I will never tube again. I am hoping to someday ski again, because I can control my direction and speed and know my own abilities regarding what ski runs to take. However, I now know that is far different from tubing, where you are at the mercy of the facility's design and are lulled into a false sense of security thinking that the tubing facility is a responsible business that was designed with safety and common sense in mind... until you hit a man-made wall at the bottom at 30+ miles per hour, because the facility chose to stay open when the runs were too slick for the amount of run-off area available. They took a risk, unbeknownst to the users... until someone got hurt.