Visitor injury in National Parks: The magnitude of the problem and how it is being addressed

On average, two visitors die in a U.S. National Park every week due to an unintentional injury. Many more people are seriously injured. Incidents that result in an injury, illness or a fatality destroy a park visit and cause grief, pain and suffering for the victims and/or their families. In early 2007, the National Park Service (NPS) initiated efforts to implement, for the first time in its 90 year history, a Public Risk Management Program to rely on a public health approach to address visitor safety in the National Park Service. While there is preventative work undertaken at the park level to mitigate risk, this work is not consistent across parks, strategies for addressing risk are not shared across parks and parks have not been provided science-based methods for carrying out risk management. In addition, not all parks assess risk mitigating strategies to determine their effectiveness.

The purpose of the Public Risk Management Program is to enhance NPS management's ability to systematically and more effectively manage visitor risk to minimize the potential for injury, death and property damage among visitors to the 392 NPS units throughout the United States. This presentation will describe the most recent data on visitor injuries that have occurred in National Parks and identify the activities that pose the greatest threat of injury to Park visitors. The presentation will describe how visitor safety has been handled traditionally in Parks, examples of best practice among Parks in visitor risk management and injury control and ways in which this new program will change how Parks address visitor safety in the future.