The Smiler Incident 02/06/2015

[SteveJ]

3 hours ago, ChessingtonSam said:

Regarding the 999 calls, or lack thereof, to be fair to the people who witnessed this horrific accident they probably had no idea what to do. Put yourself in their situation, you dont really know what happened, what is happening, and if the emergency services have already been called, and as for Towers themselves, at first it really seems shocking that it took 20 minutes to call 999, but wasnt it mentioned that Alton's own First Aiders on the scene?

 

This is a very wrong assumption. For all visitor attractions, let alone Alton Towers, emergency response training and procedure is essential.

 

Alton Towers and all Merlin parks operate a high risk assessment and emergency response procedure. Everything from (in Thorpe Park's and Legoland's cases) airplane crashes from the nearby air ports to parkwide evacuation for chemical/terrorist/fire incidents is written down and plans made.

 

Every single attraction also has access to an internal emergency hotline, either a designated telephone number to the park's operational base or an emergency radio channel. This would call the relevant duty staff to the scene who should then have called the emergency services within minutes, such a ride collision would have been obvious, as well as the park's internal response procedure for a coaster crash set in motion (which in this incident wouldn't have been much help considering they were stuck above the ground).

 

17 minutes for an emergency call to be made is appauling by all accounts. It sounds like a lack of communication from the frontline or lack of staff awareness of the proper procedures (which is the fundamental part of why the whole thing happened)

[MattyMoo]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/alton-towers-smiler-rollercoaster-crash-8893176

 

The Mirror have more CCTV - it shows (briefly) the empty train valleying and the other train at the top of the lift hill - you can see just how windy it is by the tops of the trees on the lift hill.

[Ryan]

They've been fined £5million, nowhere near enough.

[MattyMoo]

21 hours ago, MattyMoo said:

What sort of fine do we estimate Merlin getting? £5,000,000 sounds possible to me...

 

 

Just call me Jart...

[KingNemesis]

1 hour ago, Ryan said:

They've been fined £5million, nowhere near enough.

Have had to pay £70 million of costs though

 

EDIT: After looking at the number more carefully it was 70k  Thanks Ryan for pointing it out

[Matt 236]

The size of the fine does not surprise me at all. Hopefully with this out of the way we can move on from this terrible accident and ensure this never happens again. 

 

Had ad this been any other UK park that had received such a fine, bankruptcy round be happened surely. 

[Ryan]

10 minutes ago, KingNemesis said:

Have had to pay £70 million of costs though

 

It's £70k not million, isn't it?

[planenut]

11 minutes ago, KingNemesis said:

Have had to pay £70 million of costs though

Really? I think they were lucky that the fine was not more, but look here as to costs...

http://www.burtonmail.co.uk/5-million-fine-for-alton-towers-owners-merlin-entertainment-ltd-over-smiler-roller-coaster-accident/story-29754241-detail/story.html

 

 

[Mitchada04]

The fine is only for the H&S breach, doesn't include what the victims received. It's hard to put a price on it all. The court isn't out to destroy the business and the fact merlin have played ball the whole time has helped them out massively.

 

It's okay though, they'll just cut 5 million from Chessingtons next project.

[Project LC]

Don't think its possible to cut £5m from Chessingtons next budget seeing as it would never have been that high.

 

The £5m I think is too little. They broke countless rules and because of them 2 people lost limbs. £5m is basically nothing to them and while I'm sure they would have learnt from this it's the loss of income that will be driving it not this fine.

[Ian-S]

My first reaction was "how much?" but I guess the way the Judge looked at it is they never denied liability, have done good by the victims and have acknowledged and fixed the flaws so bankrupting them would do nobody any favours, especially the victims.  It's also in line with previous non-fatal fine levels, if you ignore inflation.

 

I see the judge has rulled it was not human error at fault, I think here he's trying to differentiate between human error and human negligence, but joe public is so thick to understsnd this they may assume he means it was a computer error, but whether the press will run with this is another thing, wonder what Vicky will think of this?

[MattyMoo]

http://www.burtonmail.co.uk/5-million-fine-for-alton-towers-owners-merlin-entertainment-ltd-over-smiler-roller-coaster-accident/story-29754241-detail/story.html

 

That link has slightly more CCTV footage - the empty train seems to sit right at the top of the inversion static for what seems an eternity, I'm surprised that's possible

[KingNemesis]

33 minutes ago, Ryan said:

 

It's £70k not million, isn't it?

Ah yes, it was. Looked at it rather hastily at work and thought I saw a few more digits!

 

It was: £69,955. (And 40p)

[StevenVig]

1 hour ago, Mitchada04 said:

It's okay though, they'll just cut 5 million from Chessingtons next project.

 

For that to be possible Chessington would need to actually have a project and or budget to cut from. Seeing as their annual budget is about £1

[Coaster]

£5 million isn't anywhere near enough in my opinion.  Despite the fact that Merlin's response after the crash was, on the most part, good - I think that the complete lack of safety protocols and appalling procedures that caused the crash deserved a much higher fine than £5 million.

 

The fact that the crash was so avoidable is the worst thing, with the correct procedures in place it simply wouldn't have happened.  Now that the full details have been released it really makes you think though; how many rides at Merlin parks were running without the correct safety procedures, and for how long?

[Roodie]

One question I am curious about, the £5M fine is likely to come direct from Merlin along with the legal and court costs.  However wouldn't the compensation for the victims come out of their public liability insurance?  If so it will of course cost them a lot more over the years for the insurance, but the actual costs hitting their bottom line would be lower.  Just a thought.

[Mer]

"The £5m fine given to Alton Towers is a record for the theme park industry, the Health and Safety Executive has said."

 

Wow. 

 

Oh well, at least Merlin now have another record-breaker  

 

Also: "...and stressed the firm was not an emotionless corporate entity."

 

LOL. I have so many words on that statement...

[Ian-S]

18 minutes ago, Roodie said:

One question I am curious about, the £5M fine is likely to come direct from Merlin along with the legal and court costs.  However wouldn't the compensation for the victims come out of their public liability insurance?  If so it will of course cost them a lot more over the years for the insurance, but the actual costs hitting their bottom line would be lower.  Just a thought.

 

Doubt their insurance will cover them for negligence, mine doesn't, even less so if you admit it was your fault.  No, compensation will be coming from profits, and probably justifying more cuts, or lack of new rides, in coming years.

 

It's also been questioned in the past where these fines go, in the case of the banking industry, the fsa fine were shared out between the other banks, rather than being paid to a central fund.

[Roodie]

1 minute ago, Ian-S said:

 

Doubt their insurance will cover them for negligence, mine doesn't, even less so if you admit it was your fault.  No, compensation will be coming from profits, and probably justifying more cuts, or lack of new rides, in coming years.

 

That's what I was dreading, more excuses for spending less.

[Han30]

6 hours ago, MattyMoo said:

http://www.burtonmail.co.uk/5-million-fine-for-alton-towers-owners-merlin-entertainment-ltd-over-smiler-roller-coaster-accident/story-29754241-detail/story.html

 

That link has slightly more CCTV footage - the empty train seems to sit right at the top of the inversion static for what seems an eternity, I'm surprised that's possible

 

That is crazy!!  That empty train was upside down for a fair while, jeez

 

As for the £5mil fine - I'm quite surprised it wasn't more as it was down to negligence. 

 

Alton Towers to their credit did admit full responsibility from day one - but that doesn't take away the fact that something like this happened when it was avoidable- lessons may have been learnt but those individuals involved in that smash have to live with what happened for the rest of their lives - yes they would have got huge compensation but that means nothing when you've lost a limb/incurred serious injuries - and thats just the physical suffering.

 

 

[Coaster]

Just seen this video which shows the full CCTV recordings of the incident.  I've linked it because it shows that the train stopped on the inversion for 20 seconds before rolling back, which I wasn't aware of.

https://youtu.be/rttaQxF3eDc

 

[Marc]

Whilst 5 Million dont sound an awful lot, it is the highest fine which has been issued in this industry - also the judge said the fine was originally 7.5 million but was reduced on Merlins guilty plea. This also wont include the costs of compensation to the guests on the ride - and of course the business impact felt by Merlin and which will be for i expect a few years yet.

[Mer]

That CCTV footage is ridiculous - aside from how long the train was stuck upside down, it was going back and forward for over 2 minutes! How the hell did nobody see that on the CCTV screens in the console?!

 

"If engineers had checked the CCTV in the control room, they would have seen the stalled carriage, the court has been told."

 

The "control room" presumably being the console where the operator is, where the CCTV screens are right next to the control panel (same with any ride with CCTV). I can't help but feel like we still have unanswered questions here. How can both the engineers AND the operator not have spotted the train? I'm surprised at how little focus there's been on that in the news reports (although I've only read BBC), I mean the engineers not being familiar with the ride/not having read the manual is one thing, but you don't need to be trained on something to look at a CCTV screen and see a train rolling back and forward.

[Marc]

34 minutes ago, Mer said:

The "control room" presumably being the console where the operator is, where the CCTV screens are right next to the control panel (same with any ride with CCTV). I can't help but feel like we still have unanswered questions here. How can both the engineers AND the operator not have spotted the train? I'm surprised at how little focus there's been on that in the news reports (although I've only read BBC), I mean the engineers not being familiar with the ride/not having read the manual is one thing, but you don't need to be trained on something to look at a CCTV screen and see a train rolling back and forward.

 

From what i understood from the court case the problem come with the confusion between the number of trains on the track - the engineers resetting it thought there were 4 and accounted for 4 trains when of course the 5 with on the track and stalled. 

[Ian-S]

That extended video reminds me of something that happened on the swarm at summer nights, basically the brake run did it's job just a little too well and we were left stranded on the last turn hardly moving, eventually after 10-15 seconds physics took over and the train continued on the run down round the rest of the corner to the second brake run and we trundled into the station most people none the wiser to how close we'd just been to being stuck.