Seems fairly slow for all the mayhem that happened.
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She broke a jaw, but she's getting a great story out of it. Kind of.
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That was my thought too, but I guess if you have a big heavy thing pulling your strapped-in body at 20-30 mph while your head is stuck, it may be enough momentum and force to ... you know (pointing at neck). I kind of had the vision that it would have happened really fast, but at that speed I wonder if it would have visibly slowed the raft. You kind of hope it happened really fast for the sake of everyone involved.
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Maybe the head hit the lady in face broke her jaw and came to rest in her lap. Then in panic she grabbed and winged it off her landing ahead of the raft. Also one of the local news networks went to the small town where these 2 ladies live and talked to a relative who confirmed the broken jaw and the other fractured the orbital bone around her eye that will require surgery. I will also add a little blood mixed in water looks like a whole lot.
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I've always heard that slide is mind-blowing...
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Not clicking on that picture. No way.
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Not anywhere near as horrifying as I expected.
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I question whether not the woman truly has any idea what hit her.

Think about everything that's going on that moment. First, you've just lost your bearings coming down that big damn hill and while going up it you're getting a massive jet of water right into your face and eyes. Then the impact is going to be loud and jarring as hell so you're going to flinch and most people are going to instinctively close their eyes and turn down/away from the impact.

And if it was one woman's eye and another's jaw, are we dealing with a JFK style magic bullet? Seems unlikely. My guess is the whole body smoked the first passenger and had enough mass to it to drive her back into the second passenger.

It's a shitload more likely than a radar guided precision head strike.
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Oh I agree, I had just read that and thought well that is beyond fucking horrifying if true.....
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How can a 10 year old boy's head impact the netting with enough force to decapitate him, while the other 2 in the raft (adults?) didn't hit it at all? My first thought was that the broken jaw and orbital fractures were done as part of the accident and not by flying body parts.
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If they weren't elevated by the bump, they wouldn't have hit it.

So if their harnesses held, they wouldn't have struck the structure. The raft is pretty heavy, it's not as though the whole thing left the track, he just came out of the raft and hit the net/bars.

I'd imagine it was the body that did the damage.
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Not cool. A kid was decapitated.

Rest In Pieces little guy.
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Darwinism is a real bitch sometimes, and can take many unusual forms.

And if/when I'm decapitated, I hope it's just an internal decapitation. That way I can get up, dust myself off, and have a few laughs about it over beers with my buddies.
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I kind of half-wonder if he didn't come out of the raft. The force required for decapitation makes me wonder if he was still strapped in, and then his body got pulled forward with great force while his head was hung up in the netting or on a pole or something. If he really came out of the raft, I could see a serious injury or death, but not that catastrophic of an injury if he was only hitting at 25 mph or so.
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I think you over estimate amount of force needed to pull head from body. There are many documented reports of decapitations by hanging using the long drop method. They used a formula to calculate the body weight to get to the rope slack length needed to snap the neck. The US Army used the long drop method to execute the war criminals or WWII. We are talking a raft loaded up to 550 lbs not counting raft itself and traveling at a speed of we dont know what. I doubt it was any problem at all to do what it did.
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