Smiler rollercoaster at Alton Towers - carriage collision

bainbridge said:
Well I hope the media have exaggerated and it turns out nobody lost any limbs.
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I'll put this code here that only I will understand but will make sense and we'll see what is confirmed - FOT
My eldest daughter came in late last night, woke us up and confirmed what I'd heard.
 
EVH said:
For instance, the fire service could tell you more about the layout of some of our hospitals and remote sites (community) than most of the staff.
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At our Trust if an alarm goes off they HAVE to attend even if it's false and from the alarm signal they know exactly where to go.
Funnily enough I was on a site yesterday that showed old pictures of our hospital and the building that was to the right of ours, that was knocked down recently, used to be a Fire Station.
Scroll down - http://www.workhouses.org.uk/StokeUponTrent/
 
Kemik said:
So how long is a reasonable amount of time for someone to get across a park the size of Alton Towers, see what has happened, contact the emergency services, then for the services to get to a fairly remote location and across the park?

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have just seen the ride and said "yeah, I can sort this!".
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999 should have been the first response by the ride operators, getting on to the internal comms system whatever that may be and calling the in park first responders should have been secondary. Although lets face it they have enough staff on that ride for them to be doing both at the same time so there should have been no delay in alerting the emergency services or the in park staff.
 
tom_e said:
999 should have been the first response by the ride operators, getting on to the internal comms system whatever that may be and calling the in park first responders should have been secondary. Although lets face it they have enough staff on that ride for them to be doing both at the same time so there should have been no delay in alerting the emergency services or the in park staff.
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That's normally what happens outside of parks. Person calls 999, ambulance dispatched and CFR desk identifies opportunity for local CFR to be dispatched.

It looks like here that the seriousness of the situation wasn't passed on by the ride operators and the person on the radio thought it was just another first aid case.

We're just guessing until some kind of report comes out.
 
tom_e said:
999 should have been the first response by the ride operators, getting on to the internal comms system whatever that may be and calling the in park first responders should have been secondary. Although lets face it they have enough staff on that ride for them to be doing both at the same time so there should have been no delay in alerting the emergency services or the in park staff.
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But also remember that most of them are minimum wage students/ex students or people who can't get a job anywhere else and more than likely bricked it.
I'm not saying this out of spite but when Creda/Hotpoint shut down those who couldn't get a job ended up at Alton Towers.
 
Dimple said:
But also remember that most of them are minimum wage students/ex students or people who can't get a job anywhere else and more than likely bricked it.
I'm not saying this out of spite but when Creda/Hotpoint shut down those who couldn't get a job ended up at Alton Towers.
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I don't really see that as an excuse, all they had to do was make a phone call. If every single staff member nearby was unable to do that then there is a severe problem with their training or with the quality of person hired.
 
ubersonic said:
To be fair, you didn't need to be a nuclear scientist o avoid the Fukushima disaster (nor were the people who caused it), that was kind of my point, any time you allow humans to override safety systems it's usually a bad idea. If the system had been left in maintenance/test mode like some engineers are saying it would have to have been in order for the crash to be possible then that's another example of human error triumphing a complex safety system.
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I don't get the Fukushima reference but that's rather OT...

Completely agree about maintenance overrides of safety functions though. The system will be designed to 'fail safe' (stopped) when a potential safety problem is detected, and the operator/maintainer will then be under pressure to get the ride working again. If overrides are used it's effectively transferring responsibility for safety from the equipment to the human, and humans aren't as reliable. Back to the need for the safety culture to make sure safety isn't compromised...

Anyway, enough rambling, I found the following post which provides some info on the Smiler design, how it's operated and possible accident scenarios:

http://forum.towerstimes.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=822462#p822442

It will be interesting to read the HSE report when it's eventually published.
 
Dimple said:
At our Trust if an alarm goes off they HAVE to attend even if it's false and from the alarm signal they know exactly where to go.
Funnily enough I was on a site yesterday that showed old pictures of our hospital and the building that was to the right of ours, that was knocked down recently, used to be a Fire Station.
Scroll down - http://www.workhouses.org.uk/StokeUponTrent/
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Indeed. Unwanted fire signals (UWFS) are the biggest cause of headache for them as most hospitals are recorded as "life risk" sites, so they will attend if someone burns toast. Most trusts will also have 1-button mobilisation for the fire service.

Anyway, I hope those injured get well soon and they (Alton Towers) can put preventative action / systems in place to prevent a recurrence. This is pretty basic stuff and no doubt going to result in enforcement action.
 
wonko said:
I don't get the Fukushima reference but that's rather OT...

Completely agree about maintenance overrides of safety functions though. The system will be designed to 'fail safe' (stopped) when a potential safety problem is detected, and the operator/maintainer will then be under pressure to get the ride working again. If overrides are used it's effectively transferring responsibility for safety from the equipment to the human, and humans aren't as reliable. Back to the need for the safety culture to make sure safety isn't compromised...
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It was in relation to the overrides/human aspect, the reactor itself was actually fine following the quake/tsunami and would have shut down automatically had operators not overrode the safety systems and kept it running. They did that because they believed they could get portable generators to the site and restore power to the cooling system before it's backup power ran out, they were wrong.

Like you said, humans aren't as reliable as machines.
 
10 mins for the first aiders to escalate doesn't seem that long to me. I mean you could fudge the figures if the ride attendants had basic first aid you could say there was someone there immediately. Considering it took the ambulance service 6 mins to call in the fire brigade the initial 10 mins it took for first aiders doesn't seem an issue to me.
 
tom_e said:
999 should have been the first response by the ride operators, getting on to the internal comms system whatever that may be and calling the in park first responders should have been secondary. Although lets face it they have enough staff on that ride for them to be doing both at the same time so there should have been no delay in alerting the emergency services or the in park staff.
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Surely the first response would be to ensure no other cars could leave the station. Considering we don't know what happened it may be that they were ensuring the safety of other guests and not making the situation 100 times worse but another car malfunctioning.
 
ubersonic said:
It was in relation to the overrides/human aspect, the reactor itself was actually fine following the quake/tsunami and would have shut down automatically had operators not overrode the safety systems and kept it running. They did that because they believed they could get portable generators to the site and restore power to the cooling system before it's backup power ran out, they were wrong.
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OK thanks for explaining - I don't remember the overriding safety systems bit so will have to do some reading up. I was wondering if you meant Chernobyl which would be another good example.

It's got me curious what safety approvals apply to a rollercoasters.
 
loopylou said:
Surely the first response would be to ensure no other cars could leave the station. Considering we don't know what happened it may be that they were ensuring the safety of other guests and not making the situation 100 times worse but another car malfunctioning.
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There's only 2 cars isn't there? I can't remember it's been a while since I've been on it.

Either way there's is literally a good 6 or 7 members of staff minimum dressed in smiler gear working around the ride, it doesn't take a genius to have some dealing with situation while another alerts the correct people.

Also if their on site medical teams were there in 2 minutes it doesn't take someone who's supposedly trained in first aid another 15 minutes to realise this is a bit more than they can deal with.
 
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loopylou said:
Surely the first response would be to ensure no other cars could leave the station. Considering we don't know what happened it may be that they were ensuring the safety of other guests and not making the situation 100 times worse but another car malfunctioning.
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Press the red button, takes like 1 second. All machinery has an emergency stop button.
 
Glaucus said:
Press the red button, takes like 1 second. All machinery has an emergency stop button.
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If it was working ?

If it was a failure of the ride and multiple systems had already failed it could be a possibility the emergency stop also failed. It might have taken longer for the engineers to make the ride safe before an initial evaluation could be made ?
 
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Kemik said:
So how long is a reasonable amount of time for someone to get across a park the size of Alton Towers, see what has happened, contact the emergency services, then for the services to get to a fairly remote location and across the park?

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have just seen the ride and said "yeah, I can sort this!".
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If I had of been there then I would have concluded immediately that there were more casualties than me by myself - therefore I needed assistance, that I couldn't actually get to those casualties myself without incurring potential danger to myself - therefore I needed specialist assistance. That takes less than a second to come to the conclusion.
 
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