Dreamworld safety officer felt 'fobbed off' over training requests
Dreamworld management “fobbed off” a safety officer’s attempts to provide out-of-hours training to staff at the Gold Coast theme park, an inquest has been told.
Rebecca Ramsey, a nurse, told the inquest into the deaths of four people on the Thunder River Rapids ride she had often attempted to secure approval to bring in staff before their shifts to receive training.
Ramsey told the Southport coroner’s court that despite the encouragement of her supervisor, Andrew Navarro, she was left frustrated by management’s response to her requests.
“It was all a ‘we’ll wait and see’ conversation,” she said.
Barrister Matthew Hickey, representing the family of victim Cindy Low, asked if she felt she was being “fobbed off”.
“Sometimes, yes,” Ramsey said. Ramsey was among the first-aid officers at Dreamworld who responded on 25 October 2016 when a malfunction led to two rafts colliding and flipping.
Low, Kate Goodchild, her brother Luke Dorsett and his partner Roozi Araghi all died in the tragedy.
Ramsey, who is one of four former employees suing the park for psychological trauma, believes an operator pressing an alarm button would have provided a swifter response than their radio signals.
“There was a bit of a delay between the Code 222 Blue call and the 222 Grey,” she said.
“I still feel that just pushing that emergency button would have had a more rapid response.”
Ramsey said Dreamworld had no designated safety officers rostered on weekends.
She was working as a ride operator on the 30-year-old Thunder River Rapids ride in 2009 when a girl slipped under a raft and into the water before being rescued.
Ramsey said she wasn’t aware of any investigation following that incident.
Despite undertaking risk assessments at the park after changing roles to registered nurse and safety officer, she hadn’t been told of other previous incidents on the ride, including one in 2004 when a woman fell off a raft after two collided.
The production of more than 1,000 documents by lawyers of Dreamworld’s parent company, Ardent Leisure, brought the inquest to a premature halt on Thursday.
Counsel assisting the coroner, Ken Fleming QC, said the documents were still being examined by his staff and would affect questioning of Dreamworld attractions supervisors Jenny Knight and Jason Johns as well as attractions manager Andrew Fyfe.
Knight and Johns were due to give evidence after Ramsey but were pushed back to Friday, while Fyfe’s testimony was postponed until the end of next week.
Barrister Bruce Hodgkinson, for Ardent, apologised for the late production of the documents but said they were constantly trawling company records for evidence.
“We have had four people fulltime going through materials. There are 600,000 emails,” Hodgkinson said.
Before the inquest resumed on Thursday, Fleming apologised for accusing Shine Lawyers of compromising witness evidence by publicising the details of the former employees’ lawsuits.
Fleming maintains, however, that it would have been better to wait until the inquest was over before making the announcement.