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| Are Disney Parks Safe Anymore? |
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| Isn't it nice to know that Mikey's attempts at making a few more bucks are potentially endangering thousands of people daily? |
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| Gotta Love Those Stock Options!!!! |
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| Update: November 07, 2000 |
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| I realize that some things are incredibly complex to recreate to the point of illustrating exactly what happened in a given particular situation. However, I don't believe that in situations consistently occuring often and repeatedly, that one should just sluff these situations off as "one of those things that just happen". There are often causes underlying these seemingly coincidental situations: |
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| 1. Disney Parks have had an unusually high rate of serious injuries and deaths related to their attractions. These include the Columbia anchor death at Disneyland , the near miss this summer at Space Mountain with a broken off ride component and a guest, the recent crushing of a small child at Roger Rabbit's Toontown Spin, causing probable brain damage, and the recent death by blunt force chest trauma by a Splash Mountain passenger log. This is, by most standards, a large number of serious injuries and deaths for any theme park, especially one like Disney that is so seemingly concerned with safety. I believe that if a simple carnival received this many complaints of serious injuries and deaths, it would be shut down. |
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| 2. Correlating temporally with the increased incidence of safety concerns, management has been severely cutting budgets, particurally in the realms of safety, employees on site to handle a situation, and cast member training. Remember that an official panel found the training issue to be the primary cause of the Columbia accident. For signs of future potential tragedies, read David Koeing's discussion of the recent maintinence problems at Disneyland's Star Tours, with various descriptions of how the cabins are literally rotting apart. |
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| 3. It seems that as budgets for safety matters get cut, more people end up getting hurt. Why? Let's just say that I'm quite familiar with the ride system. I never worked on the attraction, but I did work on another mountinous attraction nearby, and toured the Splash Mountain facility often. The man in question (I'm declining at this time to call him an idiot, because some stories I'm getting suggest he was having a heart attack, and some suggest he was mentally ill). Either way, the following scenario is what SHOULD have happened when he even began to exit his vehicle. The show lights would have brightened slightly, and a voice (not the prerecorded "looks like brer bear's causing some trouble upstream", but a real live castmember would have spoken into the cave or whatever he was in. Even before this happened, the castmember should have shut off the local valves causing the area's boats to stop completely. If this was done, he would not have been struck by a boat, as they would have been stopped. Believe me, there's no point during the ride where you're not at least theoretically in visual range of a camera monitoring your activities. Just a few hours ago, Disney made a statement claiming that the boat was "out of visual detection from the camera". I know of no such place in the entire ride, and it seems to be the same kind of excuse they made when they blamed a faulty anchor at the Columbia accident, and have never acknowledged any guilt for their faulty training services (which exist till this day). My current theory is that not enough castmembers were being used to monitor the boats, in a cost saving move by Disney. |
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| That costs more money... Periodic maintinance and repair in terms of thousands of dollars, or slightly less periodic out of court settlements in terms of millions of dollars? |
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To most people,the latter would seem to be more expensive and costly, but to the Disney corporate greed machine, it's better to play Russian Roulette with the well being of guests and all but eliminate once routine safety considerations in favor of the almighty dollar. Two incidents at Disneyland this week beg the question...ARE THE DISNEY PARKS SAFE ANYMORE?
First, all three rafts ferrying guests to and from Tom Sawyer Island broke down recently, stranding 200 people on the island and causing a raftful of frightened guests to drift down the Rivers of America until they were rescued by Cast Members. In the past, there would never have existed so many badly functioning rafts, and repairs to damaged ones would have been carried out quickly and efficiently. Now, however, with the continuing corporate obsession with cost cutting "fat" such as maintinence and repair issues (which exist almost solely for guest safety) , more guests are being at best inconvenienced, and at worst endangered. Recently at Space Mountain, a part of the ride lodged loose and caused the ride to perform an emergency stop, injuring eight people, one seriously. The jury is still out on the cause, but I'll bet the accident had something to do with increasingly lax attention paid to safety concerns at the parks, in order to increase profit margins just a little more. Remember that last year someone was killed when an anchor for the Mark Twain Steamboat came loose (sound familiar?) and flew several dozen feet into a crowd, hitting an innocent guest and killing him instantly. Later independent investigation revealed that improper safety procedures (the cast member was new, and there was no supervisor on duty, as management couldn't afford him due to the budget cuts coming from higher up) were the most likely cause of the disaster. Of course, Disney played the role of the concerned corporation, and vowed to increase attention to safety issues at the park, and they did, for about four months. After the media attention died down, they started cutting more money out of the budget for safety issues. MY PREDICTION IS THIS: IF THINGS DON'T CHANGE AT THE DISNEY PARKS (AND IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THEY ARE), THEN ANOTHER PERSON WILL DIE IN THE NEXT EIGHT TO TWELVE MONTHS FROM LACK OF CAPITAL DESIGNED TO PROTECT BOTH GUESTS AND CAST MEMBERS. JUDGING FROM THIS WEEK, UNFORTUNATELY, MY PREDICTION SEEMS EERILY PROBABLE. I HOPE I'M WRONG...
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