£5M Alton Towers handed record fine for Smiler crash horror
ALTON Towers operator Merlin Attractions was yesterday fined £5million after admitting health and safety breaches over the Smiler rollercoaster crash.
Two teenagers – Vicky Balch, then 19, and Leah Washington, then 17 – each lost a leg in the collision in June last year.
The horror incident “changed the lives of some of those injured in the most dramatic way”, according to a judge.
Stafford Crown Court heard that the victims watched with “disbelief and horror” before ploughing into an empty carriage on the track.
The prosecution likened the impact to a 90mph car crash.
The court heard that an engineer “felt pressure” to get Smiler back into service after it developed a fault shortly before the devastating crash.
An expert witness report, compiled by consultant Stephen Flanagan, said Alton Towers management linked bonuses to “acceptably low levels of downtime” on their rollercoasters.
Judge Michael Chambers QC called the accident a “catastrophic failure” by the company involving basic health and safety measures.
Risk
He said the “obvious shambles of what occurred” could have been “easily avoided” by a suitable written system to deal with ride faults and a proper risk assessment.
The judge added: “This was a needless and avoidable accident in which those injured were fortunate not to have been killed or bled to death.
“Human error was not the cause, as was suggested by the defendant in an early press release.
“The defendant now accepts the underlying fault was an absence of a structured and considered system – not that of individuals’ efforts, doing their best within a flawed system.”
Miss Balch, Miss Washington, fellow front-row passengers Joe Pugh and Daniel Thorpe, and Chandaben Chauhan, who was sitting in the second row, were all seriously injured when their fully-laden 16-seater carriage was crushed against the other car.
In a statement, Merlin Entertainments chief executive Nick Varney (above) said the company had “let people down with devastating consequences”.
Earlier, he ignored questions over whether he should resign.