Alton Towers fined £5m over Smiler horror crash
ALTON Towers bosses were yesterday fined a record £5million for “catastrophic” failures over the rollercoaster crash in which two girls each lost a leg.
A judge described the crash on the Smiler ride – likened to a 90mph car pile-up – as “needless and avoidable”.
Michael Chambers QC said operators Merlin Attractions put the safety of thousands at risk and the fault was theirs.
Human error was not the cause, as the company said, and individual staff did their best within a “flawed system”.
Bonuses
Calling the crash in June last year an “obvious shambles”, the judge criticised the lack of a proper system to deal with faults and risk assessment.
Sixteen people were injured, five seriously, when a fully-laden carriage smashed into an empty one on the £18million ride at the Staffordshire park.
It took five hours to free victims and Vicky Balch, then 19 and Leah Washington then 17, each had to have a leg amputated. The judge said: “This was a needless and avoidable accident in which those injured were fortunate not to have been killed.
“The defendant now accepts that the underlying fault was an absence of a structured and considered system.”
Earlier Stafford Crown Court had heard how engineers overrode a defect detected by computers, with one feeling under pressure to get the ride back in service after a fault. Bonuses were also linked to “unacceptably low” levels of downtime.
Joe Pugh, 18, Daniel Thorpe, 28, and Chandaben Chauhan, 49, were also seriously hurt in the crash, which changed lives “in the most dramatic way”.
Lawyers for Merlin, which admitted breaching the Health and Safety Act, said nobody had resigned but the company had seen a £14million drop in revenue and had “got the message” by making changes to safety, equipment and training. Later chief executive Nick Varney admitted it let people down but denied it was made up of “emotionless corporate entities” and apologised.
Lawyer Paul Paxton, representing eight victims, said of the fine: “Money alone will never replace limbs nor heal the psychological scars. This has not been about retribution, it has been about making sure lessons have been learned.”