The shock was deep under the showmen on the Rhine bank in Mainz on Wednesday evening after the serious accident of an employee of a ride.

On Thursday, the relief among those involved in the Rhein-Frühlings, a two-week fair between Theodor-Heuss-Brücke and Kaisertor, was all the greater.

The showmen and their employees gathered for a service on the exhibition grounds, led by a pastor with family roots in the industry.

The colleagues prayed for their colleague, but they were able to celebrate the service with equally good news.

Daniel Meuren

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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During the night there was information from the Mainz University Clinic that the employee of the Intoxx ride was not nearly as badly injured as initially thought.

He escaped with eight broken bones, but he was spared the feared serious damage to his head and internal injuries.

"Without downplaying the injuries suffered, we all feel a sense of happiness," says Marco Sottile, spokesman for the Mainz showmen's interest group.

Sottile was one of the first to arrive at the scene of the accident to help.

"I was expecting the very worst." That's one of the reasons why he immediately campaigned for the entire exhibition center to be closed for the rest of the day; the carousels and the Ferris wheel didn't turn again until Thursday.

The 25-year-old showman was hit by a cabin of the ride, which was swinging back and forth at high speed like a modern swing boat, on Wednesday afternoon at around 2:45 p.m. and thrown a few meters through the air before he landed on a fence, as eyewitnesses later said police described.

Obviously, the man experienced in working on the Intoxx had entered the swivel area at the wrong moment.

Investigations on Thursday morning confirmed the first impression of the police and trade inspectorate on Wednesday evening.

Even then there were no indications that another person was at fault or that there was a technical defect.

The police therefore dropped their investigation.

A spokeswoman for the structure and approval authority said on request that an expert had checked the system again, which had already been accepted as required before the start of the trade fair, and that the occupational safety and health conditions were also being checked in order to finally determine the cause of the accident.

Until then, the ride was shut down at the fair, which continued on Saturday after a day of rest on Good Friday.

Few accidents at folk festivals

The news of the accident in Mainz spread like wildfire in the showman scene.

And so it was also a topic of conversation at the spring Dippemess' in Frankfurt on Thursday.

The operators of rides, who are aware of similar risks, did not want to express their names from a distance.

One said, however, that "there is never absolute safety and there is a certain occupational risk." A debate about safety at folk festivals is not appropriate.

The showmen referred to the strict and regular controls by the TÜV and the extremely small number of incidents at folk festivals in relation to the many millions of visitors.

The Mainz police confirmed this to the extent that nobody in the police headquarters could remember a comparable case.

Accordingly, there are no statistics at all.

Two decades ago, a rotating ride that stopped at the apex caused a stir.

The passengers had to be freed by a complicated rescue with a crane truck.

"That was during the wine market, a power failure brought the device to a standstill at the most inopportune moment," recalls showman spokesman Sottile: "That used to happen again and again during power failures, but since DIN 13814, which was introduced in 2013, something like that has happened not possible anymore.

Since then, every ride has had to provide emergency power for an emergency rescue.”

At the latest this tightening of the specifications, which caused enormous conversion costs for many showmen, has made folk festivals even safer, says Georg Spreuer, spokesman for the Rheinhessen Showmen's Association.

From his point of view, technical defects are largely excluded, passenger safety has top priority anyway.

However, he sees a source of danger when the work becomes too routine.

“Then inattentiveness can creep in, which primarily endangers the employees themselves.

An accident like this one certainly sharpens the senses, but even without an accident you have to make sure you keep reminding yourself of everything.”

That's also the impression you get when you watch some of the rides at Dippemess.

There, the mostly young employees often move on the edge of the danger zone.

"But they know exactly what they're doing," says Sottile: "After all, part of the showman's job is to put yourself on display a bit." It's important, however, that you don't tempt visitors or children to imitate you and that you pay close attention to it that they cannot get into the danger zone.