webslave

Even putting aside the question of whether the park has improved since those photos of the 80's and 90's, I even wonder whether the question could even be set at the lower bar of has the park aged well? Real, proper genius is hard to manufacture. But if the tide is out in the talent pool your only other option is to preserve and maintain what you've got. Seems like they did neither.

On the plus side, if we mandate stripping down the paint every ten years the parks might stand a chance of looking a little better...

I only disagree with: I firmly believe that if you have young children, Dreamworld is your best choice of a park to visit in terms of ride selection.

Thankyou for sharing that with us.

I know that's what the website says and all, but given I'm looking at traffic across three that are currently in use as I type this there's a bit of a disconnect between the website and reality... (are you surprised?)

At the end of the day they could (and probably did) have easily closed TRR for a month and not fixed the flaws that helped lead up to the incident.

...be sure to experience it? The hell?

Bad example, because Telstra actually does still provide dial-up for Jim (and will even still sell it in some cases), but I know what you're saying. I'm not even disagreeing, just pointing out the former characterization.

Formerly known as loyal long-term customers providing regular income when we needed it.

No, they mean exactly what it says there. Previously a condition of holding the car collection was that it needed to remain air conditioned. With the cars gone they won't need to spend money running air conditioning any more, ergo it's going to be a hot new venue.

I'm quite sure Bermuda also had a working turntable that was later disabled.

In which case, actions of the park not withstanding, how did it keep getting inspected and re-certified?

Great write-up JDude. In terms of updates, any chance you could just post a link to your Google Doc and then a summary at the end of the day?

That makes more sense. I didn't like the implication that it was operating unregistered.

Is this sly reporting though? It's plausible that they sought an extension to the registration to allow them more time to have someone inspect it and said extension was granted.

We. Don't. Know. That. Yet. Do you think if someone had an accident at work and were hauled in to answer questions about it that their first response would ever be "yes, we have had heaps of training on it - I just decided not to do it"? To an extent this is the type of testimony anyone would be expecting to hear at this early stage. There's already been a number of items of testimony that either don't make sense or don't line up with one another (based on the reports). This alone should be sufficient for you to not yet be deciding who is negligent and who is not.

Set up to fail, perhaps - but in so many years of operation this is the first time we saw this event happen. The investigators were not even able to recreate it based upon the report of their testimony. It's easy to get tunnel vision on something like this and start thinking it was always a death-trap. It's rarely that cut and dry.

We might yet find out there is one. It's still early days in evidence, and you also don't know what's being said but not reported.

Also, we are talking about panicked operators here. We haven't yet ascertained at which point they even became panicked as far as I have read. Was the dropping of the water level (when it was even noticed) enough to create panic? Probably not, given it had already happened a few times that day. Was a raft approaching another raft near the conveyor even a cause for concern much less panic? From what I'm reading we haven't even established that yet - all the more so when you consider that the police tried this a number of times and couldn't recreate the problem. It's well and good to talk about E-stop buttons and how effective they are, but what if we eventually establish that none of the staff (even with a full training package) could foresee that one raft coming into contact with another was going to cause a roll-over until said roll-over began, by which time even a two-second e-stop would have been too late? By that stage it wouldn't matter if the first aid kit was missing band-aids or "incomplete" and it wouldn't have mattered if the staff weren't first aid ninjas.

The other thing to bear in mind here is that what's being presented here is evidence, rather than confirmed statements of fact.

When you're talking about people having to "live with it" (as just one example) you're making final conclusions.

Hang on a minute, you've had second hand information from the tabloid press over a day and a half of evidence-giving in a hearing - but we are already talking in absolutes about who did what, when they did it, what the buttons were set up as, and who is to blame? Fuck me sideways we are getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?

You nailed it - I said the exact same thing about the shopping center show - no photo op there, complete waste of time.

I'm not particularly familiar with the term "positive energy stop". Is this a term used to describe a system that uses energy to stop a mechanical element (eg; if you had a flywheel it would apply friction braking)? The seven second delay on conveyor stop seems strange itself, much would the idea that they conveyor would coast (except, perhaps, backwards if it was loaded?). Probably barking up the wrong tree here.

Just on this - on our most recent trip I would have just about gone to Sea World because I also have a young lad with a weakness for the pups. With that said, my guess was two of the pups come out with Ryder (?), he talks for a bit, the pre-recorded mayor calls and says something about some event they are doing later and that it might be ruined, they call for volunteers from the audience to join the paw patrol, and then they do that god-awful pup-pup-boogie thing a few times. Sound like a good guess? If so, it's because we saw an identical show at what basically amounts to a dead shopping mall in Melbourne, and if that's the case to think that one of their key entertainment shows is that grade... well... yeah, forget it.