MARSEILLE (AFP) – A father died and his three-year-old child was injured in southern France after an inflatable structure they were playing in at a water park took off during high winds.
The 35-year-old man, had been hospitalised with his child after the accident at the water park in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in the Var region, hugely popular with tourists in the summer, but later died, a source close to the investigation said yesterday.
The structure, some 20 metres (m) long, jumped about 50m at the Wonderland Waterpark, with both victims trapped inside, the fire brigade said.
“How can a water park that had been accepted on the municipal territory to bring joy and happiness to children be transformed into a machine of death that strikes down an entire family?” the local mayor Alain Decanis wrote on Facebook, saying that an investigation opened by prosecutors would provide answers.
The boy, like his father, also had to be resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest and there was no immediate detail of the child’s condition.
The Wonderland Waterpark opened only this summer some 40 kilometres outside the town of Aix-en-Provence.
