[SPEAKER_00]: Can we talk 7 hours?
[UNKNOWN]: Can we talk about 7 hours?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hellooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to get made fun of for my fear of travel by air.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather drive 24 hours than fly for two hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my defense, there's more to flying than just flying.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the preparation, the buying of the tickets, the drive to the airport, the check-in of bags.
[SPEAKER_00]: slow trudge through security, but who's counting all that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we're talking about here is safety, usually when someone is coming up against me on why I should fly rather than drive, flying by planes statistically is safer than driving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Check, gotcha, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But what do the stats say about survival rate of a crash?
[SPEAKER_00]: What percentage of people survive a car accident in comparison to a plane or a helicopter crash?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: You ever had someone share that they got in an accident on the weekend and assumed that they meant to fucking plane crash or a helicopter or a helicopter crash?
[SPEAKER_00]: A little rotor bender like that horrific incident last week on the Hudson.
[SPEAKER_00]: In New York, the Jersey where it was with those kids from Spain and the family and this horrific shit, I can't even look at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you haven't heard anybody say that they got in a little rotor vendor in a fucking helicopter because they would have died, had they been in that situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been in fender vendors and told you about it, but not in rotor vendors, hell about amusement parks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do amusement parks strike you as perfectly safe with the dead-eyed teenagers snapping gum in their mouths while lazily pulling switches, sending constant herds of people hurdling down a track and into a tunnel and through a few loops.
[SPEAKER_00]: What could go wrong there, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's perfectly safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing really could go wrong there.
[SPEAKER_00]: People tell you, they say, with all the fail safes, they're involved with roller coasters, but do you know where the idea is for fail safes come from?
[SPEAKER_00]: Previous failures of safety.
[SPEAKER_00]: Usually the result of human error, welcome to dark topic of your host, Jack Luna.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a true crime happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smiler.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stratfordshire, England's Alton Towers is a world-brown theme park that opened in the spring of 1980, and has steadily grown over time and popularity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alton Towers is the UK's most popular theme park, welcoming nearly 2 million visitors per season.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's grown in size over time with its offer of nine rollercoasters amongst other attractions that sprawl the former grounds of the Earl of Struzbury whom we all know in a Maya, surely.
[SPEAKER_00]: But by the summer of 2015, Altantowers had seen a steep rise in notoriety, followed by a death-defying drop.
[SPEAKER_00]: In ticket sales, the Smiler, aka the Marmalizer,
[SPEAKER_00]: came to the public's attention in a marketing blitz across the UK, leading up to the 2013 Alton Tower's season, running March through November, marginalized that word it is slurred out is British slang for destroy or pulverized.
[SPEAKER_00]: I assume it's in reference to Marmalade, which is pulverized and disgusting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like Marmalade.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we could fight on this, but that's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: This word was used excessively, the word caramelized in the buildup to the Smilers, debut.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smiler ride itself was only hinted at through plastering of its logo everywhere across the UK from its cities to its shires.
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture two spinning eyes and a wide smile, that's the logo, its reminiscent of the
[SPEAKER_00]: This yellow black and white imagery was on billboards in the form of spray paint on the side of buildings.
[SPEAKER_00]: To those of the UK exposed to this clandestine campaign, it seemed there was a graffiti blitz by a new Banksy style artist.
[SPEAKER_00]: The logo was found painted on the sides of sheep.
[SPEAKER_00]: starting a Twitter trend at the time of Hashtag Creepy Sheep, but by the opening season of 2013, all was finally explained.
[SPEAKER_00]: Altantowers had a new attraction, the Smiler, a world-record setting thrill ride with 14 inversions, you know, upside-downers looped deloops, not just looped deloops,
[SPEAKER_00]: corkscrews, bat wings.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's all this lingo with these fucking rollercoaster enthusiasts.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The concept of the coaster was of a correction facility.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smiler rided promised to force smiles from its passengers.
[SPEAKER_00]: This, what, well, is an infinity coaster, it's still available for people to write, and it was made by famed German coaster creators, Gerst Lauer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Infinity coasters can hold more passengers and have built-in systems to hurry along the process of processing thrill seekers that has multiple trains as they call them moving along the track at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're constantly moving
[SPEAKER_00]: the car that just took off, the train that just took off to come back to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's another one right away and they're all in sync.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they have things involved with infinity coasters like a magnetic reversal device that would quickly pull pastures back to flatter areas should a malfunction occur and ensure quick evacuation to reset a ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: this ride, this smileer, had a lot of issues leading up to its debut, teething problems as the park would call them, things like parts flying off, screws coming loose, and tracks separating normal stuff, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: normal growing pains for a new coaster, apparently.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was expensive to make the Smiler, 18 million pounds, a hefty sum, close to 25 million US.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just for the coaster, that doesn't count shipping in assembly, so the park was under pressure to get the Smiler moving, or else the marketing scheme and the money pumped into that
[SPEAKER_00]: Employees of the park assigned to the Smiler would later share how they've been pressured to minimize downtime once the ride was finally deemed safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ready to roll, we got to make money on this thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smiler needed to do as advertised, or the park could go under.
[SPEAKER_00]: The goal would be to process 1200 park goers per hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: a dizzying number.
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They got five trains.
[SPEAKER_00]: They got 16 people on each train.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's 50, that's 80 people that can go if they all were going at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you need 1200 to go through every hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not up for doing the math.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just thinking about it right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could, but I won't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you got more time than I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just off the top of my head.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, 1200 per hour, 60 minutes in an hour, 1200 divided by 600 and how the fuck am I going to figure that out?
[SPEAKER_00]: my God.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's constant.
[SPEAKER_00]: No doubt about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have to have all trains just available and it's just running through.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's a problem, there's going to be a big problem and this pressure from the park being like, we need to at least this many people going through because there's at least this many people that are excited about this ride and we want them to go home saying, you got to go to the park and ride the smaller.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's competition in the area,
[SPEAKER_00]: And with places where I grew up, there was only one place.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the UK, there's multiple places.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the UK is a strange place, a very interested place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever heard of it?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just a lot of competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I grew up, there was just one spot.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was like, don't fuck yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You showed up, you're gonna wait for two hours in a line.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ultimate parks, they did not want this.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to have everyone enjoy the smileer right from the start.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the right itself, you know, it's dizzying to even look at.
[SPEAKER_00]: It still exists today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to give it a shot to explain it, but I don't want to end up tongue tied, which isn't a bad explanation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, picture a black tongue tied multiple times and flickering out at times and looping down a long gene Simmons tongue.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you got a bit of an idea with a smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looked like, or you could just look it up, you know, take a look.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smaller will reach speeds of up to 85 kilometers per hour, 53 miles per hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: It begins with two lift hills, the first happening, you know, lifts you to the top of the hill, drops you go through a bunch of incline sections and then you pull it up again.
[SPEAKER_00]: and you're pulled up by a large chain in the center of the track.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been in a fucking roller coaster before, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The smaller cars, the automatically separate from the chain at the highest point, and let you go in that gravity, do its thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of the two lift hills on the smaller, it's a regular lift hill when you first get there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then after going through the inversions, the second one pulls you up this track, which leaves giggling passages lying basically on their backs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's meant to be like your patient strapped to a chair at a psych ward.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smileer is very complex and separated into stages meant to make the rider forcibly smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: In stage one, it's called the inoculator and it gives you a jab a happiness you can just float through.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second stage is called the tickler and it forces riders to smile against their
[SPEAKER_00]: The third stage is the flasher, and there's blinding lights hitting you, and it creates swirly glazed over a smiley eyes in your mind's eye, the well, right in your face, but they stick in your mind, and it's like you're going through this process that the smiley much should go through, the fourth stage is the giggler, and you get sprayed with this intoxicating laughing gas they tell you, but it's just water.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the fifth stage is the hypnotizer, designed to disorient, mesmerize and disrupt, self-awareness is just a heinous bunch of flips and spins and all that at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to beat the shit out of you, to make sure when you get off that ride, you're screaming, you're panting, you're smiling.
[SPEAKER_00]: All through the experience, riders are overloaded with mind-muddling music and
[SPEAKER_00]: The smileer, here I play a little bit of it for you here right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, see you get the idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ha ha ha ha ha ha like fuck, oh my god.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fine when you're in the ride and it only goes for a few minutes, but imagine being stuck on that ride and these people that are we're going to be speaking about here who obviously come into a dark topic because that's what we're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had to hear that over and over and over again for, I think it ends up being
[SPEAKER_00]: five or six hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, you'd hope they would have turned it off at some point.
[SPEAKER_00]: But imagine that in a catastrophic event, as you know is coming with a fucking roller coaster that you're having to hear that over and over again, I think for at least they were hearing this for two hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once off the ride, if you make it off the ride, you are greeted with a messaging on a board there saying, you now belong to the Smiler.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something that on June the second of 2015 became a reality for 16 riders.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shoulder strapped in, four to a row, and four rows for over four hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just explained that they're four to a row, and this four rows back, the 16, and the strapped in, but they're on a kind of a platform.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big
[SPEAKER_00]: rectangular piece of metal and they're sitting in their seats and they're with in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're you're kind of held by this train this base of a train car you could picture it as served up on a platter really.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a windy day too windy to ride the smaller.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smaller it has a wind safety limit of 34 kilometers an hour
[SPEAKER_00]: Winds are being clocked at 46 kilometers an hour, which is like 25 miles per hour, and it's at around 115 pm that 16 passengers and train for, they're told they'll need to exit and I believe or wait until the ride was safe to board again, they just got it on, they were checking all the safeties and the wind was too high.
[SPEAKER_00]: They get off, and they have to wait a while here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently besides the wind, there have been multiple technical issues, plaguing the ride this fateful day.
[SPEAKER_00]: While the passage is wait, train three, an empty train car, a 16 seat ride car, was sent alone through the smaller, to clearly these alarms, and ensure a good reset of the ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: this empty car did not make it through the entirety of the track because of winds and the light load without passengers trained three failed to make it through a bat wing sequence and rolled backwards through a valley back up the hill preceding this valley back into the valley trying to get back up into the bat wing back into the valley back and forth rolling back and forth for a minute or two before finally coming to rest in this low part of the ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ride engineer, you know the teenager who pushes a button and sends 16 or so souls flying into a roller coaster experience, the ride engineer hadn't been informed of train three being sent through the ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also of concern, those who had sent train three through didn't check to make sure it made it through.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, of course, know that it didn't, as did some park doors filming all of this from the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have it all collected for you to watch and read further on in the show notes, but let me have a shot at it first, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: The waiting passengers, they finally re-bored train four at around 140 p.m.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been standing around for half an hour before that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been in line, none of the 16 passengers opted to leave during this delay because
[SPEAKER_00]: The ride finally begins, it's still super windy, they shouldn't be riding, but the ride operators have been told we need to get 1,200 people through here every hour, let's meet this quota, the ride begins, and the smaller begins working, it's dark magic.
[SPEAKER_00]: These passengers to get pulled up the track can get let down a hill and it happens again on their backs after a few inversions to get pulled up a steeper inclined for my understanding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually I've watched the ride you can watch it again this show notes you can see this point of view of the ride and they're all smiling.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's a lot of fun when you have something happened to you in a ride, which seems intense and then something more intense happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, pulled up on their backs now when it was a little bit less initially.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they get to the top of the second in-cline are ready to be dropped again, but then a failsafe is initiated.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ride has detected that train three is stalled up ahead in the valley down the hill
[SPEAKER_00]: And here they should be magnetically pulled back to safety and told to exit, but the operator is fucking clueless to train three not making it through the track because the operator, the right operator, doesn't know that it was even sent through at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he or she, they are them, decide they should press the fucking button, hold it down and push the show on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Override, the fail say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what that all sounded like.
[SPEAKER_00]: From the screams of pleasure, from the ride operator pushing them over the hill, to them spinning around a few
[SPEAKER_00]: The audio here comes from someone on the ground, filming, the smileer.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can slam, anyways, we'll explain what happens here, but that-that-that-that-that-that-that-that-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
[SPEAKER_00]: Train 4 with its 16 passengers, slams into the stall to an empty train 3.
[SPEAKER_00]: Waiting for them in the low valley of the ride, it goes full speed into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The force amounts to a 1.5 ton crash at around 120 kilometers per hour, 75 miles per hour, which is like a highway speed if you're trying to stay just below pull over territory on a cop's radar.
[SPEAKER_00]: The empty train 3 has a T-bar on the back.
[SPEAKER_00]: used to pull it around for maintenance.
[SPEAKER_00]: This bar, it slams through the front of train four with all the passengers and it works to help further fuse the two trains together.
[SPEAKER_00]: The impact crunches and melds heavy metal together, but this T-bar is instrumental in doing the most gruesome work here, ripping apart and crushing the legs of the two front middle passengers.
[SPEAKER_00]: blood sprays over everyone behind them, the footwell of the center front row has been crushed down from half a meter to a few centimeters, one and a half feet or so to an inch or so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a lot of legroom up there, all of a sudden.
[SPEAKER_00]: Leah Washington, 17, has her left leg crushed, marginalized as the marketing team for the Smiler would say.
[SPEAKER_00]: She is at the park with her boyfriend, Joe Pugh, who he grabbed a quote from previous there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's their first date.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty unforgettable if they make it out alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Joe, his kneecaps have been shattered.
[SPEAKER_00]: His legs broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pinky finger of his as near ripped off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Joe was yelling at the onlookers that we just heard filming there to stop filming them and get some help.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else at the back saying, stop the fucking ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's been stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can't blame them for asking to stop the ride to reverse this somehow.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the ride's been stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not something the laugh at.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just crazy that this has happened and
[SPEAKER_00]: You hear someone saying, stop the ride, like let me off, is what he's trying to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like for Christ's sex, that hurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Joe Pue, he's screaming at those that are filming this to use those phones that they're filming with to call an ambulance, like I said, and he's saying, for Christ's sex, you fucks call an ambulance.
[SPEAKER_00]: His girlfriend is in shock.
[SPEAKER_00]: She and the girl next to her, 20-year-old Vicki Balch, have taken the brunt of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: While Leah has had her left leg crushed, Vicky has had her right leg destroyed, crushed as well, Vicky will have this to say later, quote, I just wished I would die.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pain was unbearable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And keep in mind of me, you got, ha ha ha ha ha.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole fucking time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vicki's boyfriend, Dan is beside her, and beside himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: His legs, their broken, his lungs, their punctured.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's making it difficult to speak, let alone scream, because of this puncture.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the others are screaming, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind the four unfortunate souls that the front took the front of this, another dozen passengers are howling in pain and begging for help.
[SPEAKER_00]: All have internal injuries and whiplash.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a nightmare.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been 10 minutes since the impact now, and nobody yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: has called for emergency services.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although they've collected a lot of video from the cell phones.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you imagine that this is the world we live in?
[SPEAKER_00]: The public will stand around gawking and just film things rather than call for help.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to show everybody that they know that they were a part of something rather than help.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your first instinct is to, oh shit, look at this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I want to share this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was around this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your first instinct should be, holy fuck, something bad's happening, how can I help?
[SPEAKER_00]: But not in this day in ancient scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The public they stand around gawking.
[SPEAKER_00]: The park workers looking around at one another, they're just going like, what happened?
[SPEAKER_00]: And every single one of them, with a phone in their pocket, or up, filming this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But no call for 10 minutes, 12 minutes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of video taken, like I said, but no phone calls to 999.
[SPEAKER_00]: Quite a few to 666 apparently, but 999.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the helpless writers are trained for of the Smiler, they will and pain, and they are drowned out by the Smiler music at times, which continues to insanely play on the loudspeakers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Smiler himself intermittently providing that sadistic cackle.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, as if this were what the Smiler wanted, he wanted his helpless captives in this situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: When emergency crews finally arrive, 50 minutes after the crash, my God, they couldn't initially figure out how to get to the victims.
[SPEAKER_00]: A fire truck with a cherry picker had to figure its way in.
[SPEAKER_00]: That arm in basket is designed to go up, but the position of the fused, smaller trains was at a lower value of the track with an excavated empty space below that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, apparently this complicated things, and it took over four hours to get everyone out eventually.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of metal needed to be cut once they got in.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fire department, even with their top of the lying tools, they had difficulty fighting through the jammed front row restraints of the smileer, everyone else kind of got it quicker.
[SPEAKER_00]: If nearly two hours after such a crash could be quick, quick and comparison to the poor couples at the front.
[SPEAKER_00]: the two young women, Vicki and Leia.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are in agony and have life threatening leg injuries they're bleeding out.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would bleed out if it wasn't for the compression keeping them from doing so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both eventually had to have their legs amputated once they were out.
[SPEAKER_00]: One each, one leg each, the two girls they had sat side by side for over four hours with their legs closest to one another, one closest to each other at the left and then the right completely pulverized by that T-bar, it's unimaginable and it's a miracle that now the died, though through the agony they wish they could and there are so many more injuries that you can imagine here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine your left leg or whatever one of your legs you're sitting in one of those fucking roller coasters.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just crushed Your pelvis, you know, your genitalia your hips your internals your stomach I mean fuck your feet Everything's just crushed on that side and you're there for four hours because those are the ones those two girls were the hardest to get out
[SPEAKER_00]: They're doing sure that once they release them, once they were able to get through everything, because they're the most crushed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just about being careful about how fucked up they are from this and doing something that...
[SPEAKER_00]: allows for the body to evacuate in certain ways while they're by blood or just being disemboweled or whatever else they gotta be careful in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: This section is more crushed than the other sections because it took the brunt of the hit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're tearing through everything with jaws of life, with saws, whatever else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's causing more pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my God, for four hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they did survive.
[SPEAKER_00]: a criminal investigation into the incident would reveal that four engineers working that day, they'd not read the Smiler's operations manual and they figured this out by getting them to do a test on it and it was clear that they didn't know what the fuck was going on with the operations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two of the staff members had been deemed to have never even read the risk assessments of the ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I mentioned earlier, workers had reported feeling immense pressure from management to minimize ride downtime and maximize profits, which was deemed to be a huge problem here.
[SPEAKER_00]: also the high winds that day exceeding safety limits by 12 miles per hour, that should have kept the ride closed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nobody properly communicated about that test carriage, you know, train three that have been sent out, which is the biggest fucking problem here.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you send a test carriage through?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're the guy who sends it out and you don't confirm that it had come back, they didn't do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no communication on the initial send-out of that test carriage to the main right operator that they even done that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just like pause, hold on a minute, we're doing something.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll let you know when it's time to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they do let them know it's time to go, but they haven't confirmed that it came back.
[SPEAKER_00]: This, all this fucking mess resulted in altant hours being closed down for a week out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're a fine 5 million pounds, which is like 2% of their seasonal earnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smiley was back in business the following season.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though it was now missing any mention in its marketing of marmalising its passengers, because that's what fucking happened to those girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're legs.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were marmalised.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nick Varney, Park CEO, personally visited each victim and apologized to the public he had this to say, quote, this has been a terrible incident and a devastating day for everyone here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a very strong record of safe operation of our rides here at Alton Towers and it is our priority.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would like to express my sincerest regret and apology to everyone who suffered
[SPEAKER_00]: who gives a fuck I mean that has to be said it's funny how the press will say while the public received this very well knowing that the CEO had gone and visited everybody in Nick Farney.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh man, one a good guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean it's really not his fault, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: At least he sent that out to everybody and he visited the families and at least he did that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know man, maybe Nick Farney needed to walk through the park at the from time to time, talk to the people there, make sure that everybody understood how fucking important it is to keep people safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know this though.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you tell the public that you're worried about safety.
[SPEAKER_00]: It matters how much that kid pushing fucking buttons.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's 17, 18-year-old kid pushing buttons at the amusement park cares about your safety that day.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's all that matters.
[SPEAKER_00]: or how competent he is or how competent the people that he's working with are.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you have a push to have 1200 people go through in an hour, it gets redundant, it gets, you know, you get desensitized.
[SPEAKER_00]: to how important it is what you're doing, fearing these people through this ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, ensuring their safety, you lose sensitivity to how dangerous this all could be if a mistake is made.
[SPEAKER_00]: Altant hours naturally saw big drop and attendance as it closed another six rides to update safety measures, following the smiley debacle of 2015.
[SPEAKER_00]: Accidents involving rollercoasters aren't as rare as many think, usually it's a case of passengers behaving like idiots and finding themselves hanging from a gondola or falling out of a swing from 20 feet in the air.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the case of the smather, we clearly have park employees at fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smather tried to tell them something was wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're right itself built
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way in which he was trying to avoid human arrows, but alarming, this smile itself is like, hey, there's a fucking train on the track.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't send it on their train through, but there's not much you could do when the operator keeps pressing the go button and telling the smileer, it's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smileer's just a machine, it's like, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: send them through.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are plenty of lawsuits and payouts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some still in the works behind the scenes, 16 cases in total I presume.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who knows?
[SPEAKER_00]: How many?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a few people who took to filming the carnage got in on the act, this being such a traumatic scene in all.
[SPEAKER_00]: For everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: On a positive note, Joe and Leah, the young couple on their first date, they married eight years later.
[SPEAKER_00]: The trauma they endured together that day bonded them.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the smileer it rolls on, as the show must go on.
[SPEAKER_00]: To think that these poor people, they waited for ever in line, then through delay, only to be sent into a horrific crash that caused another four-hour wait that had a few passengers asking for release, even if it had to be at the hands of death,
[SPEAKER_00]: in that way to think that this all occurred in a ride that promised to caramelize its victims is an incredible story to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I go so far as to say a dark topic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I go so far as to work on this case for three days and then record it for you and hope that you liked it or thought that it fit here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dark topic is supposed to be about dark topics.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to just go on to crying, but I'm trying to branch out a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you found this as fascinating as I did, and as scary as I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I find myself shying away from these contraptions these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm getting too rotund and rusty to be shaking around after standing for an hour in the hot sun, like an animal being led to slaughter, with a bunch of other animals, faces smeared with ice cream.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was at Disney,
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard a story of some lady who had to suddenly shit in line, so she pulled up her skirt, squatted, and sprayed a wall with what was troubling her, then shuffled back into the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I know sometimes, especially if you have a medical condition, when you got to go, you got to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'd argue that if you got to go in the form of spraying a wall with liquid shit at Disney,
[SPEAKER_00]: Shitting all over the wall midway through an hour long weight of a line If you had to go like that then I think you got to go afterwards like out of the line and go find a janitor or go home or go to the hospital Don't go back in the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what we're dealing with in society these days There's a bunch of fucking morons running the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you talked to anybody that you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're a fucking idiots
[SPEAKER_00]: These are the people running this show.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always been this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for anyone to tell me that everything's safe, that everything's going to be okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: In any certain situation, I roll my eyes and say, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm going to stay home and figure out how to make pizza.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe watch a movie, play some chess, some scrabble, do a puzzle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, I think we're done here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm happy to be released of the subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had my fill of airports and airplanes clearly in lines and amusement parks, obviously, and all the horrors that come with all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to be, but the world sure makes it hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had so many horrible experiences on flights recently, in traffic recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm turning into a middle of nowhere, guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: My man can certainly just give him my kids exposure to the things that they hear are fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I give them those opportunities by, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it just me or do you any of you feel the same way where it's like, hey, an airplane ride supposed to be fun to a destination where you get federal day on a beach.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you get there and it's like the airplane ride was a huge pain in the ass.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone the airplane was a fucking piece of shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: You got treated like fucking garbage, like a prisoner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you got overcharged by it as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you felt unsafe the whole time because claims have been falling out of the air and then you land and you get to the resort say, I haven't been to one for a while and then you crowded on to everything again and everyone around you was talking about politics or fucking their sports team they care about and the dumbest of us are talking the loudest and the most intelligent aren't there because they're too intelligent
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want a fucking be around it anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, wait until some of this gets figured out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, how do you go back to the 1950s?
[SPEAKER_00]: Call the herd?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want that to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also don't want myself in these situations really anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm done listening to people's tell me that, you know, cheer up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have a better attitude.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I see what I see, I feel what I feel, and for me I'm going to avoid it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, I did it, enjoy my time with you today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really did.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a couple of beers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I smoked a couple of cigarettes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been working on this for days and enjoyed this subject because it was so haunting.
[SPEAKER_00]: With the, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, John Joyce is calling me.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna put it in a brutal real soon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll put that out for everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a little bit of a new format there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, I'm okay with the fact that now we all,
[SPEAKER_00]: Along to the smileer, I as cocked doors like stay paranoid, think about it, avoid when you can, maybe you're better than me and you can fight a way to have fun out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Share your stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Share your negative stories when it comes to things that are supposed to be ultra fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you work your ass off to make the money to go and do these things a trip, you know, and go to amusement park.
[SPEAKER_00]: Share your stories with me that are positive or negative.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd be interested to know and read how wrong I am or maybe how right I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have been listening to dark topic plus an exclusive piece of content.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just got doors lock, stay paranoid, talking to you soon.