THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Early Summer 2018 37 TheCoastalBend.com experience like speed, gravitational force (“G’s”), centripetal force, friction, and the like) was never calculated by the Verrückt team. Not that anyone on the team was trained or qualified to do it. In a revelation almost as shocking as the incident itself, it was revealed in the Kansas indictment that neither Jeff Henry, nor John Schooley, visionaries and designers of hundreds of waterpark rides across the world, possess any formal engineering education or certification. It’s all trial and error, and appar- ently it always has been for Henry & Sons Construction. In fact, it was Jeff Henry’s self-ascribed identity as the self-taught, water ride mastermind-maverick that was perfect for TV, and he knew it. As the drama of de- lays, terrifying test rides and redesigns played out on Xtreme Waterparks, all cen- tered on the danger of rafts flying off the slide path as they eclipsed Verrückt’s second peak of some 55 feet, Jeff Henry the TV character took on a bigger than life persona as an other-worldly genius who doesn’t follow the rules but makes the new rules that the rest of the world, in his case the waterpark world, will learn to follow. Henry’s recorded statements could not have been clearer in explaining his mindset and his approach to creating Verrückt: “We’re going to set the standards up, and set the education up, and we’re gonna redefine many of the definables that have been defined in the industry that we couldn’t find a good reason for. Like a 48-inch height rule. Why 48 inches? I could never figure out why not 47 inches…it made no sense to me. And so we’re gonna change all this now in the park, and hopefully change it worldwide in all parks and get back to rational, reasonable, scientific decisions as to why and how we run our facilities.” Fascinating words of profound wisdom and insight from the Steve Jobs of wa- terparks—cue the dramatic bumper music and cut to commercial. The real-world result of what Schlitterbahn now refers to as “acting,” amounted to the willful dis- regard, to the point of condemnation, of long-established design, engineering and safety standards of the amusement park ride industry in the construction of Ver- rückt, as alleged in the indictment. Verrückt’s delays extended from weeks into months, into the next year’s sea- son, all played out on the Xtreme Waterparks series, and almost entirely surround- ing the issue of rafts going airborne on the second hill. Half of the first ride had to be dismantled and rebuilt in an effort to resolve the dynamic engineering problem, and even if the claim today is that Henry and Schooley were just hamming it up for the cameras, their frustration and, frankly, cluelessness, could not be more evident: Jeff Henry on the subject of Verrückt design science: “I’m not quite sure yet. Many things, I think. There’s a whole bunch of factors that creeped [sic] in on this one that we just didn’t know about. Obviously, things do fall faster than Newton said.” John Schooley on the subject of the rebuild to correct the problem of airborne rafts: “The worst possible thing that could happen is that we have miscalculated again— there’s many things we’ve changed—and we again put the rafts into the air. That would cause us to come back and redo what we just did and reconstruct and redesign the ride again. It would be a disaster.” Based on the plot line of the Xtreme Waterparks episode in which Schooley’s words were uttered, one would presume the “disaster” to which he referred was one of continued delays and cost overruns—and in the end, those factors won out versus rider safety, and no one could have been clearer in that assessment than Jeff Henry himself, who said, after two missed grand opening dates in the summer of 2014: “[Verrückt] could hurt me. It could kill me. It is a seriously dangerous piece of equipment today because there are things that we don’t know about it. Every day we learn more…I’ve seen what this one has done to the crash dummies and to the boats we sent down it. Ever since the prototype, and we had boats flying in the prototype too…it’s complex. It’s fast. It’s mean. If we mess up it could be the end. I could die going down this ride.” A week before Verrückt’s grand opening in July 2014, Henry & Sons hired an outside engineering firm to conduct acceleration tests on rafts going down the slide. According to the criminal indictment, the accelerometer tests indicated that rafts in the 400 to 550-pound range would likely go airborne at the crest of the second hill. Prosecutors contend that Henry and Schooley either ignored the test data, did not understand the data, or understood the data and opened the ride anyway, a week later. Jeff Henry in front ofVerrückt, at 168 feet, 7 inches, the world’s tallest waterslide, and the fastest at 70 mph down the first drop.Verrückt’s second hill rose to 55-feet.