Merlin Plead Guilty To Health and Safety Breaches

In June last year, a horrific accident happened on The Smiler ride in the X-Sector area of Alton Towers where a cart with 16 riders collided into an empty test car on the batwing element on the ride where many riders were treated for serious injuries and two female riders had to have their legs amputated

Today, Merlin Attractions operations Ltd who own Alton Towers and many other of the UK's best attractions (Thorpe Park, Chessington) pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety act. The Heath and Safety Executive said that although the rollercoaster was mechanically safe, there wasn't a system in place to inform staff if a ride car had stopped on the track. The court were told how a stopped train had shown up on a computer however one of the rides operators did not see this and they overrode the system to send the carriage that had the passengers in it around the track.

After Merlin pleaded guilty, they were told by District Judge Jack McGarva that they would face a 'very large fine'. To end the hearing, District Judge McGarva referred the sentencing for the case to a higher court. The sentencing hearing will be held at Stafford Crown Court on the 20th of May.

After the hearing, the prosecutor the the HSE, Bernard Thorogood said how staff had no proper system to help deal with unexpected problems like this incident and that the ride 'was not safe as it should have been'. The then said:

"The Smiler rollercoaster came into operation in 2013 in May and in our schedule ran from then until the time of the accident at the beginning of June 2015 in a way that was not as safe as it should have been. The mechanical and computer-related operation of the ride were found to be without any fault at all.

it was a mechanically sound computer-operated ride which required human intervention at many points during operation. There was an absence of a proper settled system for staff to work to in certain situations and one of those was that when one of the up-to-five trains came to a halt around the system in one section there was not a good enough system for staff to interact with that problem and a proper procedure to sort it out.

The upshot was that ion June 2 although the computer-controlled system was correctly showing one of the farthest parts of the ride, the Cobra Loop, there was a stationary train, the staff didn't see it and there was a system to it. The overrode the computer block on the system and sent the train with some of those sitting here today around the ride. As a result those in the train were injured when their train came into collision with the stationary train.Those in the front row suffered the greatest physical injuries and were life-changing in many cases."

The Health and Safety Executive have released photos of the carriage that collided into the empty carriage. These photos really show how bad the accident was. They also posted a video of the testing of the ride and the removal of the carriage as part of the HSE investigation. You can see these pictures and videos below

The Smiler HSE Image 1

The Smiler HSE Image 2

The Smiler HSE Image 3

The Smiler HSE Image 4

The Smiler HSE Image 5

After the court hearing, merlin released a statement of their own:

"Merlin Attractions Operations Limited today pleaded guilty to an offence under the the Health and Safety at Work Act.

From the outset, the company has accepted responsibility for what happened in June last year and it has co-operated fully with the Health & Safety Executive in its investigation.

We could have sought to provide help and support to all those injured in the accident and will continue to do so."

The Park re-opened The Smiler last month and as you would probably expect, the queue times haven't really been that large however, the queue time was quite large on the ride's opening day.

What do you think to this decision? Let us know in the comments