Some information on the trial regarding the Rapids at Dreamworld has come out via CF/Reddit...
- The ride's pumps had failed twice the same day.
- Unqualified personnel were forced to reset the pumps due to lack of staff.
- There was no indicator of when the water was too low, as dreamworld didn't want to buy a bucket of paint to draw the line of "minimum water height" that would have altered staff that a pump had failed as the water was too low.
- Maintenance was $125,000 over budget, so Ardent Leisure (owners of the park) had a 100% complete shut off of maintenance funds.
- The park needed to have 6 safety managers, but due to cost cutting, only one was hired.
- Due to wanting to reduce maintenance, when a board broke on the conveyors belt, it was never replaced, they only ever fixed every 3rd board.
- While most rapids rides have approx. 6-7 employees operating the attraction, dreamworld had 2 to cut cost (against the ride maker's discretion).
- The unload operator was responsible for completing 36-38 tasks per minute, making it impossible to fully make sure that no corners were cut in performing all of them.
- The unload employee had received little to no training, and did not know what the big red button did (the emergency stop button).
- The unload employee was supposedly told what the button did, which she and others deny, however, she had never pushed it and didn't truly know what it's functions were.
- The load station employee was in the middle of checking restraints when the employee shouted to stop the ride, leading for a massive delay as he jumped out of the boat, sprinted across the platform, and got his key into the loading panel to activate it.
- The wiring was a "rat's nest" according to an electrician, meaning when he pushed the emergency stop, the circuit essentially fried and did nothing, so he had to push the slow stop button, which took almost 8 seconds to stop the ride (while this may sound quick, imagine people are being crushed under a conveyor in front of your eyes, intense screaming, blood pouring out, and knowing people are dying in front of your eyes and you can't do anything to stop it. now count to 8 Mississippi's in your head).
- Once the two employees got the ride to stop, they attempted to save the victims, however, they had never received any first aid training, so they provided little services except calling for actual help, and holding the mangled bodies that floated out, hoping that if they were alive, they wouldn't be feeling any pain.
- Medical experts assume the riders died almost instantly from being thrown and crushed, however, they did say that there was a high probability that they were in intense pain as they were crushed under the conveyor.
- The raft next in line when the accident occurred contained the father and child of the lady riding in the flipped raft, and they were forced to sit there for an hour while they pulled the girl's mother from the water.
- The park had limited medical staff, with little to no medical training, meaning that even if the riders had had a chance of making it, they probably wouldn't have due to a several minute delay in medical care.
- The reason this collision happened is the first boat bottomed out and the second boat collided and rolled up and over as the conveyor belt moved, this wouldn't have happened had the water level been at an acceptable height.
- Management cut the safety manual, that hadn't been updated in over 6 years, portion regarding the flipped rafts so they wouldn't appear in non-compliance for failing to train their employees on how to deal with it.
- Thunder rapids employees were supposedly trained that she never had permission to push an emergency stop button unless the safety manager okay-d it, and although ardent has denied this, several employees confirmed that claim.
- The acceptable water level line was explained, per trainers, as a scum line, and "If it drops below that, you keep the paying guests moving through that line, maintenance will show up and reset the pumps." Yes, they're resetting the attraction while guests were on it, yes, you read that correctly.
- The park had a policy stating that if a ride had a mechanical failure, you were to reboot it twice, and if it happened again, shut down the ride for the day, the raft flip was the 3rd mechanical failure that day.
- Only 2 of the 14 people on dreamworld's board had any sort of safety training at any time.
- Despite repeated notifications, the park never installed live-feed cameras throughout the attraction, so if this accident had happened anywhere else in the attraction, they wouldn't have known until the raft got back to the station.
- If live-feed cameras were there, there was a chance that in the 57 seconds between the raft bottoming out and the collision that security would have contacted the operator and stopped the attraction in time.
- The poor ride op had received under 40 minutes of training in the morning, and then was enjoying her first ever shift alone.
- The control panel was so outdated and so poorly wired that the e-stop wouldn't have worked without the key activating the panel where the e-stop was. This was because they modified the loading a couple years after it opened from a turntable loading system, to a 2 raft, straight lane loading system, and instead of hiring a reputable electrician, they hired a cheap one.
- The ride had a massive pileup and overturn during original testing time, so they put that in the safety pamphlet, then in 2012, they realized that they never trained any of their employees on how to deal with such a situation, so rather than have important information in the book and receive large fines for never training them on it, they simply cut it out (if it's not in the pamphlet, we can't be held liable for employees not knowing how to handle it).
- The manual would have told the girl to hit her e-stop button, but since it wasn't in there and she was told essentially "this is a big red button, don't push until someone higher ranking than you tells you to," she didn't push it.
- The employee was supposedly assisting a guest into their wheelchair when the tilt started, she turns back, sees the ride flipping and tries to figure out what to do. She makes a split second decision to ditch the "call maintenance and wait for approval to stop the ride" protocol, yells at the "senior" ride operator, he sees that a raft has flipped over and another one's about to hit it, sprints across the platform and stops the ride. While Ardent claims they trained her to always push in an emergency and that it was the e-stop, she and several others who worked the position before says they were told it would stop the ride, but if something happens, call maintenance supervisor, and if they give you the go-ahead, stop the ride, since they're going to be the ones that have to deal with it if you push it and it's not an emergency.
Quite simply, some of the scariest stuff I've ever read as a former ride staff...
