A tragic accident occurred in the Maluyan Waterfall Scenic Area in Huayang City, Guang’an, Sichuan, leading to the untimely death of a 16-year-old girl. Eyewitnesses revealed more details of the incident, including the girl experiencing three impacts consecutively, the sound of her safety helmet shattering echoing through the valley, and other harrowing scenes.
In recent years, there has been a rise in extreme experience projects like “high-altitude waterfall swings” and “cliff swings” in scenic areas across China. These projects are typically set up in canyon, cliff, or waterfall areas, attracting tourists with high-speed swings and intense sense of weightlessness, widely shared on short video platforms, becoming popular “check-in” activities.
However, due to some projects being constructed in natural mountainous environments, the high demands for equipment stability, rope systems, and on-site operational safety have continuously sparked controversies regarding their safety hazards.
On May 3 at around 4 p.m., at the Maluyan Waterfall Scenic Area Adventure Park in Huayang City, a 16-year-old female tourist was preparing to leap with the waterfall swing.
According to Southern Daily, this scene was witnessed by Xiao Ping and his group from the opposite cliff. “My boyfriend even called us to watch, saying ‘this person is so cool’.” However, they never expected that in the moment the staff released the rope, this young life would abruptly come to an end, only hanging on the rope.
At that time, Xiao Ping and three friends were experiencing the cliff rappelling project, a high-altitude activity that involves climbing on a cliff. Xiao Ping had reached about two-thirds up the cliff. She was facing away from the swing area, while her boyfriend and two other friends witnessed the entire accident unfold.
“After starting, she began to fall down, revolving 360 degrees. Her head hit a rock, the plastic safety helmet shattered with a dull sound that echoed through the valley. Then she continued to tumble, the rope swinging her towards the center of the valley. The whole process only lasted a few seconds,” described Xiao Ping’s friend, with fragments of the girl’s safety helmet dropping into the water below.
Another witness also heard this loud noise and saw that, “the girl hit a large protruding rock on the waterfall.”
The occurrence of this unfortunate incident has once again sparked discussions on the safety issues of “internet-famous extreme projects.”
Many netizens analyzed the reasons for the death of the 16-year-old female tourist, with some believing that the lack of safety redundancy in the amusement facility itself, coupled with staff negligence, combined to create this tragedy.
Weibo user “The kiss mark on the right cheek” lamented: “Poor 16-year-old child, repeatedly hit on the mountain like this.”
Weibo user “Shizhuozhuo ya yi” stated that treating tourists’ lives as a traffic gimmick in the scenic area makes such internet-famous projects truly terrifying.
According to reports from various mainland media outlets such as China Newsweek, on May 6, a male tourist at the scene mentioned there was no trial flight session that day, with three staff members present. After tourists put on their equipment, they were supposed to slide forward a certain distance before the staff counted down “321” and swung out, but “this sister had just passed through the safety gate when she suddenly went down,” subsequently hitting the mountain below multiple times.
Several professionals interviewed suggested that the direct cause of this accident may be due to operational errors triggering the separation device prematurely. After viewing the video, a longtime industry practitioner analyzed that the track release device used in the project is outdated, and the project design initially did not allow for sufficient safety redundancy for the operator to make errors.
Some experts also believe that the design of the project itself was flawed, leading to the accident.
On May 6, Mr. Kong, who had experienced the project just last month, stated that he and his girlfriend, Ms. Chen, learned about the project through the official account of the scenic area. At that time, some comments in the review section mentioned that the safety ropes were single ropes and posed risks, but they did not pay much attention to it.
Mr. Kong recounted that the swing project’s platform is located at the highest point of the waterfall and offers two ways to ascend: flying cable and ladder. They chose the 598 yuan package with flying cable + swing. The flying cable took 2 hours, while the swing took about five to six minutes in total.
Mr. Kong recalled feeling that the equipment seemed relatively rudimentary when he saw it, causing some discomfort. However, after driving over two hundred kilometers with his girlfriend, they decided to experience it nonetheless. During the descent, he felt like the rope would hit the cliff directly below if it were any longer.
The video provided by Mr. Kong shows that both ropes on his equipment were double while the cable rope was single.
Public information indicates that the Maluyan Rock Scenic Area in Huayang City features typical stream valley terrain, with high mountains, steep slopes, rugged rocks, towering cliffs, and a vertical drop of over 200 meters in the valley, with the Maluyan Waterfall having a 168-meter drop (double the main drop of the famous Huangguoshu Waterfall), making it the highest waterfall in eastern Sichuan.
Two days after the incident, the “5.3” accident investigation team in Guang’an, Sichuan, issued a notice, stating that the tourist Ms. Liu was injured while experiencing the waterfall swing project and died on the way to the hospital. It was preliminarily determined that this accident was a corporate production safety responsibility incident. The park has currently been closed for rectification.