Levithian

@DaptoFunlandGuy You glossed over it way, WAY, WAY too simply by saying disclaimers cover all though. They simply don't. As far as discrimination goes, they also have a duty of care to identify that you are greater risk of injury or further injury if you were to ride, especially in the case where it goes against the manufacturer's rules or regulation for their ride. They are not required to make expect medical decisions based on what they can visualise or what (lies) told to them, and likewise, they cannot allow you to place yourself in a dangerous position even if you feel it is discriminating. You can twist it to mean anything you want, and it frequently is, but the intention of the act does not overwrite the potential to do harm. So it becomes a case of do what is reasonable and argue the fine points in court. The groundwork for what people can ride comes direct from manufacturers, then external risk assessments are done in relation with SOP's and that draws a very clear line in the sand before it's even handed over to operations to manage. What is and isn't an acceptable risk is ENTIRELY down to how much responsibility you wish to take in addition to these controls. Pro tip, it's usually very little. You are significantly increasing your exposure, and, even in the event that you did everything right, or you felt you did everything appropriately, you can still be sued for injuries. Post early 2000's public liability insurance crisis, there isn't a company in the country that won't ALWAYS err on the side of caution, even if that means becoming more risk aversive and excluding more people. Then, when you throw in it's a potentially dangerous, risk filled environment combined with the operational style of village, clearly evident/demonstrated through years of people questioning why/how they do things (when nobody else seems to), you get what you get. The problem is the world has changed, and stupid people's expectations are completely screwed. Nobody owes you anything. You pay money to enter their world, they tell you what you can and can't do, end of discussion. Unfortunately, it's flipped, and the opposite is true in the minds of a lot of people these days. It's like businesses should bend to the will or the demands of their customer/guests just because they promise to offer a token (paltry) gesture of good will that is so meager in comparison it wouldn't even cover the initial filing fee of application to sue for injury or damages. The more stupid the general public becomes, the more generalised restrictions and controls will be found because it's evident people cannot be held accountable for their own actions anymore, so you have to try to limit your exposure instead.

Each one of those "bulbs" are a 3 in 1 SMD. Both displays are custom Vuepix LED screens developed for ULA. The joker head is a custom GM series LED screen. It's still made up of a bunch of modules that connect together, but it was designed with greater LED pitch as it's purely signage, there's no infill panel it's completely open. Obviously more a bespoke design/shape, but they had a lot of problems with the GL panels over the years too, including water damage. Even if you don't lose a panel, you can lose a signal or power module that will take out an entire group and you're just left with a big portion of your sign missing. Wanted to get away from these sorts of issues. Not sure if cost comes into it a lot when you are building a custom 130sqm sign. Thats coverage about half the size of an average house. When you think of it that way, it starts to really drive home how large the sign is.

Trouble is, the ride at your own risk thing doesn't really work anymore. Why? 1) Because it doesn't stop people attempting to drag you through courts, which ultimately costs money even if they lose or drop the lawsuit. 2) It all impacts your insurance premiums. Underwriters are increasingly setting the tone for what they will consider acceptable and what they won't. The more claims you have to make, the more notice they take, premiums increase, greater restrictions are applied. 3) In Australia, disclaimers are basically not worth the paper they are written on. Basically, from a legal standpoint, you cannot knowingly allow or permit something you know could have a detrimental or have a negative impact, either physically, mentally or monetarily.How they are served makes one hell of a difference too, especially when things like tickets for entry are concerned. When you are sued the courts look at if you were actively notifying the persons of the disclaimers, when and where, and if you were just relying on a printed document or statement somewhere. It's not good enough to just basically sit back and rely on the document anymore. You can write all kinds of things in disclaimers and even have people sign them, but there are so many laws and acts that basically override them. And that's without the whole issue of negligence being able to be established which makes you culpable regardless of what is written. Village used to go one further and send some guests to first aid where the RN/EN could actually look at the type of injury and make a more educated judgement than guest services staff. I'd hate to think they stopped doing this because, aside from being a legal minefield for the parks, nothing ruins an entire family's day at a theme park like arriving and being told one of your kids is a complete bystander for the day. If that's going to happen, you'd at least like someone with some sort of medical training to be making judgement calls that will completely ruin your day.

They do and have had in the past. They have always managed to achieve a LOT with basically ZERO budget. It's downright sad how little money is available for the AV department. The problem is ALWAYS money. Both in terms of getting the funding to actually pay for all the cool stuff originally planned in the design of the attractions, AND getting the budget to maintain it with staff and replacement equipment it actually requires to keep running. The last one in particular has always been a big problem. The attitude from MUCH higher ups always seemed to be installations with complete disregard for manufacturer operating conditions/environment and forget about it. High temps? humidity? dust? nah, never heard of that. Never have to spend another cent on anything, nothing will ever fail. It's not like these media rich environments need dedicated staff to keep them maintained each day. It's fine for someone to do a pass through and ignore all the stuff that's not working because there is never any budget put aside to replace.

At best, they probably could have placed an ugly looking door across the entry way instead. They can't really build out the doorways themselves as they need to keep access to scooby. A great idea might be to install a staff change room and toilets behind the fenced area. Theres another one of these cavities on the opposite side than runs the length of the superman building in the old Chinatown alleyway too. Not as wide, partially filled with decommissioned air conditioning stuff.

They need to shut the area because there is basically ZERO services ducting in the whole area. It's a giant mess of installed and dug up and reinstalled conduit that serves basically very little. You can't make proper use of the available area with the landscape as it is, it needs a complete layout change AND the addition of services pits. So it will take a considerable amount of time to even work through the mess and change the terrain (there's quite a change in height across the whole area). Virtually the whole park is built like this to be honest. Lots of GPR work to scope the site area each time they start a new development because it's a mismatch of pipes and cabling running all over the place and the site drawings were seriously outdated (which they found out the hard way, multiple times). Some better photos on the manufacturers website. Gallery . Mini Cars & Go-Kart Manufacturers.

Absolute ridiculous to remove JDS. People who even contemplate this demonstrate they have no kids between 3 and about 8, or have paid zero attention to how busy this is during the holiday season. The reason for having JDS and speedy taxis was because speedy taxis never used to have a minimum height restriction. If your kid could co-ordinate feet standing on a button and being able to turn a steering wheel, they could go on the attraction. If they had real money to spend, you really need to shut the area for maybe 18 months and give serious consideration for enclosing the whole area. Either, actually indoors or another canopy setup in similar guise to main street. In a country with some of the harshest sun/uv on the planet, the place is a concrete canyon.

Some rides had their class rating changed/updated with the new industry guidelines that came through, so things like ride exclusion areas changed. Takes a bit of time to filter through with updates to ride registration as everyone given a hard deadline well (see, years) in advance to make sure they comply with new regulations. Virtually nothing is preventative, only reactionary. So either a forced change like above, a change to the Australian standard or it was picked up during an Audit (either Government or 3rd party) and required change of design. Lots of things may seem like a pointless proposition, but it's entirely based on either a recommendation following an Audit or when requiring replacement (this fencing was terrible for kids standing on the bottom rail, hanging on to the poles and snapping the welds) the safety team found out what the current standards are and the replacement complied. In terms of fencing and railing, they literally control not only height, but spacing between rails, gaps between infill, if anyone can get a foot hold, building types, what it's connected to, obstructions/inclusions in different zones, which side of the fence these exclusion zones are. There are far more regulations around specific distances and openings than you might think. You can literally be audited and given a notice because the spacing between railings is 12cm and the new standard is now 10cm because the old maximum opening distance was deemed not restrictive enough to prevent a person (mainly a child) climbing through and you have to go around and change everything to comply because your existing stuff isn't good enough anymore. It's a lot of work for parks to keep on top of, even with teams of safety managers. It's the primary reason for yearly auditing so you can stay on top of relevant standards and be given a chance to respond with modifications before the government starts handing out fines or (hopefully) before someone is injured or killed and your shortcomings are made public. Sometimes the answer to the question of why? is literally because nobody noticed it before.

The reality is it would likely be an open a Zamperla, Preston and Barbieri or possibly Fabbri catalogue and pick 3 or 4 replacements kind of deal.

Dont forget brake upgrades plus a control system upgrade too. Thats a big one that takes hundreds of hours of testing.

To be clear, it wasn't machinery the kid was actually stuck in, it makes it seem like he was caught in some big machine. He stuck his head through the ceiling rose and when the pole moved it pinned his head against the fibreglass opening on the ceiling. He wasn't just standing up on a character when riding, but literally climbing up the character and standing on the seat itself, sticking your head up against the pole. It's not a fast moving ride in the slightest, normally you would expect someone would see the roof coming close to them and duck down, not stick your head through the opening. There is absolutely no way to enclose the hole the poles come through, you have forward/backward motion of the crankshaft, plus some lateral movement due to alignments that have to be allowed for it to function. As said, they normally install this nylon brush stuff as a deterrent, but it's not something that actually stops you from sticking a hand (or other body part) through the ceiling.

I needed to clarify something, but I was too late with the edit. What he commented on about the failure is not quite the meaning you seem to have taken. See the term "bolted joint"? it's actually the mechanical joint itself they are talking about, how it's designed. They also didn't under design the bolt like it sounds, he is talking about its use. Fasteners are produced with tensile and strength ratings you use in the calculating the compression forces of the mechanical joint you are designing to find out if they can provide enough clamping force to prevent failure and separation of the joint. You basically receive the information from the fastener manufacturer and calculate if your intended size fits your purpose through stress and FEA calculations. If not, you go bigger, a different grade or introduce more of them. There is so much more to it than just selecting a bolt that is tough or strong enough, because, basically, even if it was such a simple overlook there is a safety factor built into every component like this, typically 3:1 or even as high as 5:1 when human lives are at risk, so the fastener should never have even approached it's tensile failure point if their engineering calculations of the joint itself were right and it failed because the bolt failed under tension and came apart. It's actually an insight into how the failure happened without even meaning to be. A more appropriate sounding phrase might be to say the wrong fasteners were used, but you can't say that in a professional capacity like this because it implies someone used the wrong components and deviated from the design, which could have wrongly suggested the park was at fault. Regardless of all of it. People were very, very lucky and it could have easily resulted in either serious permanent injury or death. It might have even been a completely different industry 18 months later when the dreamworld accident happened if it had of resulted in a death and the whole industry was audited nationwide like what followed after the dreamworld deaths and findings during the inquest. The gross negligence found (but not prosecuted) at dreamworld would likely have been discovered under the heavy scrutiny of government regulators and the overhaul and changes to operating regulations of the amusement industry might have come earlier.

Go ahead and provide a report that details the worksafe investigation, the failure and the "redesign" that followed. I'll wait. Just for a moment, think about why or how some people seem to know more technical information than is ever usually talked about, especially when it contains specific details or terms even a lot of coaster fans don't know and seem oddly specific to one ride/type. Months after? funny that the investigation hadn't even been completed, it had just been moved behind closed doors. Do you know where the car was located? it just made it around the corner before c block brakes. There are plenty of supporting photos that show a wheel carrier in the grass directly next to the queue line. To make it to the grass it actually had to fall off the car and clear the queue line and station because underneath it is the maintenance bay with a load of concrete and gravel. The only place grass is found is the creek side of the queue line. But wait, the experts said this never happened and nobody was in danger? Seen this footage before? Can you see what is located in the grass at 20 seconds in? pay close attention to the shape of the walkway (the queue line) above and think about where guests are standing as the approach one of the unloader consoles. Second thing to pay close attention to is the front chassis, its location (angle) and can you see any wheel carriers on the inside? Just to note, Movie world never actually commented on the two bolts theory because its not the truth. That rumour apparently came from what rescuers told guests, but its not based on the components that came apart, because, evidently, stuff broken and fallen off suffered complete failure, it is actually something else. The park went with the statement that there are multiple contact points with the track, even though the images and footage clearly shows the car has completely derailed and the rear chassis is suspended in the air, resting against the front chassis. The joint didn't break, it came apart. It wasn't a bolt at all. It was actually multiple bolts of a stressed mounting block that failed. MULTIPLE. For a bit of reference, the attached image is the joint being talked about, each carrier utilises one at the bottom for upstops and one at the top for road wheels. The mounting block had no dowel or pins to locate it and movement was found between the mounting surfaces due to a design failure of the stressed joint, not a bolt. In short, it didn't have the required amount of clamping force to hold it together. The movement is a shear force and bolts under tension don't deal with shear forces very well and fracture or shear off. The entire purpose of the 4 mounting bolts is to compress the joint together, generating enough clamping force that will hold it in place and stop movement due to friction. Think the same way a wheel on a car is held in place. The movement in the joint itself caused failure of the fasteners and the joint came undone. It didn't break, it didnt snap and it wasn't a bolt that was the problem. Failed fasteners were a result and a visual warning something wasn't right. The problem was s&s didn't adequately analyse and stress test this component when they upsized the capacity of the cars for the 4 person layout. The joint failed because of the stress forces encountered allowed movement which lead to the failure of the bolted joint. The outcome was to machine out the mount and carrier frame to fit larger fasteners, fit an additional one to the middle, generating higher clamping force and ensuring it was capable of withstanding the additional stress of the wider cars with added riders without moving, so it would stop fracturing bolts in service. It always had multiple bolts in place, the notion that a bolt was upgraded because it was the cause of the failure just isn't true. Take it or leave it, I don't really care if you don't believe me. Look at the evidence, even speak to people who know these rides and see what they have to say. Or don't.

Im not disagreeing with issues with operations. Im talking about the fact if you travel to other major parks around the world you will find similar 2-3hr waits for major attractions at many parks too. The video made it seem like 2-3hr waits were only encountered at movieworld, when the reality is quite the opposite. We've also been over this multiple times before, the simple fact is village roadshow utilise additional safety measures, including operational procedures in the operation of their rides that contribute (not the only reason) to the slow load/unload times. Thats what I was having issue with. From what you are saying I can tell you don't know what actually failed, or the chain of multiple other failures that occurred afterwards. There weren't multiple bolts keeping people safe, there wasn't any safety feature or component holding it on track. The initial failure was caused by failure of multiple fasteners on a single stressed mounting block that attached the lower section of one of the wheel carriers to the main spindle on the front chassis. When people talk about "the failure" this is "the failure" people talk about (usually this is because they didn't know anything else happened), this is where the "design flaw" existed, this is what allowed a complete set of wheels to separate from the spindle and entirely fall away from one of the cars. In reality, it was only the source of the initial failure that caused the accident, but it was not the only one that happened during the event. Multiple additional failures resulted in damage to multiple wheel carriers allowing the whole car to move off the rails in the process of it grinding to a halt. Multiple sets of wheels came off both chassis and allowed the car to move on the track, with the rear chassis actually hitting the track with such force it leveraged the whole chassis up and tilted away from the track coming to rest against the front chassis completely in the air. You could see the whole underside of the chassis. Guide and upstop wheels are the only thing tracking the car and essentially holding it on track. The design of S&S cars places the wheel carriers outside the track rails with nothing inside, so if you lose one wheel carrier, if the chassis moves away from the missing side, the other remaining carrier slides off the track and the car is no longer attached as there is no sacrificial point of contact like a pin or spindle that can ride along inside the rail to hold it in place in the event of catastrophic failure like what is found on a lot of coasters. The front and rear chassis are tethered together through what are basically very large pillow ball joints allowing the front and rear chassis of the car to flex during operation as it passes through things like inversions. Neither the front or rear chassis (row of seats) that make up the car were still attached to the track and had to be mechanically anchored (ratchet straps) to the track and supports to stabilise the car before rescue as it was at risk of slipping and falling. It was only the friction of the front chassis that was stopping things from moving. So, yes, it was more than enough to cause a complete derailment because one actually happened, and in addition, hundreds of kg of steel fell from a large height that could have very, very easily fallen into the occupied queue line or onto the track at unload/entrance to unload. It was a miracle nobody was seriously injured or killed. The difference in reports between the dreamworld accident and the green lantern one is simply the coroner. In the event of a death, the office/court of the coroner investigates the deaths and the mechanisms of failure and any contributing factors that lead up to the accident. This includes everything, business operation, management, culture, work histories, not just the event or the ride itself. Frequently, if accidents are too gruesome and/or determined not to be in the public interest, the reports are often withheld. By comparison, investigations by worksafe are not released, with only compliance notices or prosecutions being made public. The coroner basically decided that even though the accident contained details of some horrific injuries, the failures were so systemic and such wide spanning, that it was in the publics best interest that the report be released. FYI. Even without any operator pushing any buttons, until a car passes through the current brake block zone, the car behind it cannot enter. So even if the operators did not respond fast enough, the stranded car still occupying a block would have caused a backup and the car behind it would have been held by the friction brakes at the previous brake block. It had nothing at all to do with the damaged car though. That is a fundamental difference between both rides. One operated entirely without a block systems, with only conveyor operation being controlled when fully loaded allowing rafts to bank up at the bottom of the conveyor, while the other is a roller coaster with a fully operating block system that monitors car position on the track at all times.

They had pretty much all of this and drove the staff actually delivering on these ideals away over the last decade. Few people, unless working within a corporate environment and exposed to the decision making process understand just how much EVERY management decision is influenced by financial considerations. EVERYTHING you do, especially in this climate, comes back to cost. Want better scenery? want more immersive interactive elements? sure. You double the cost of the ride being developed. You also increase the maintenance budget to keep it running. Want an example of what happens when you put money into elements but don't step up the operational budget to keep things running? Look at pretty much every single ride or attraction at village roadshow over the last 20 years. I cannot think of any ride addition over the last 15 years that didn't have its budget amended prior to the build process being completed. Everything that was costed and agreed upon when approval to start the build ends up being reviewed and costs were reduced, usually at the expense of things they can control. Theming, visuals, operational stuff. Basically things they know will have an impact on guest satisfaction but don't rate the result high enough vs the cost savings. It's probably the single biggest reason why a wall doesn't exist, ruining any immersion left. Not because someone didn't raise it, or because it wasn't factored into it during the design or build process, but because someone likely said no. It's ok to see through to back of house or into nearby buildings. Same goes for shade and water. Someone, somewhere has decided it isn't cost effective, and it hasn't been implemented. I can imagine the pivot to this would have been to maximise retail options for people to purchase drinks instead. This is what drives the talented people away more than just wages. A lack of growth, a lack of improvements and basically just reducing everything to a budgetary consideration, results in those people leaving because their job satisfaction has taken a massive hit. Essentially, people just give up on the ideal of the business. Problem is, since covid, village parks have been having problems getting ANY staff, leading to major shortages across pretty much all departments. You can't get rid of people you consider underperformers if you trouble attracting anyone. I can tell you with 100% accuracy, that following the reopening period after COVID, a number of ride closures experienced had absolutely nothing to do with maintenance issues and everything to do with not having enough trained, experienced staff to open attractions. I would not be at all surprised if this is still going on today, operational decisions to reduce ride capacity based on cost reduction or staffing levels, not purely because of maintenance issues.