Ex-Trainer Sues Sea World Over Injuries

Only days after Sea World officials decided to allow humans to rejoin killer whales in the water for performances, a former trainer Thursday sued the aquatic park, alleging that injuries inflicted by two of the giant mammals during a show last year were caused by negligence on the part of the park and its parent company.

In his San Diego Superior Court suit, Jonathan Smith charges that Sea World and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich “negligently and carelessly owned, maintained, trained, inspected, controled, supervised, located, transported and placed” the killer whales, thereby exposing him to serious injury.

The suit alleges that park officials concealed the “dangerous propensities of killer whales” from Smith and assured him that it was safe for him to participate in the dramatic aquatic performances, even though he had no formal training.

Additional Charges

Other charges against the park and its corporate parent include fraud, battery and the infliction of emotional distress.

The suit, the first to be filed by an injured trainer in San Diego, names Sea World, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and 35 unidentified individual defendants and seeks unspecified damages.

Jackie Hill, a Sea World spokeswoman, said park officials have not seen the lawsuit and had no comment.

Smith, a 21-year-old business major at Point Loma Nazarene College, was injured during a performance a year ago today when two killer whales seized him in their jaws and repeatedly dragged him to the bottom of the 32-foot-deep pool. After about 2 1/2 minutes, during which he was smashed against the floor of the tank, Smith managed to escape. He was hospitalized for nine days with bruised kidneys and ribs and a 6-inch laceration on his liver.

Smith no longer works for Sea World. His attorney said he has continuing medical problems as a result of his injuries.

Meanwhile, Robert Gault, president of Sea World of San Diego, said Thursday that animal trainers who in December were prohibited from entering tanks alongside the park’s giant killer whales could be back in the water by the end of the month.

Trainers were ordered out of the tanks at Sea World parks in San Diego, Ohio and Florida in December, when William Jovanovich, chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, seemingly pledged that trainers would “never again enter” the pools.

Newly formulated safety procedures could allow trainers at Sea World in San Diego to return to killer whale tanks late in March, when the park begins a yearlong 25th anniversary celebration with a new killer whale show, according to Gault, a longtime Sea World executive who became president of the San Diego park in November.

“There’s no sense of urgency, and there’s no schedule” for returning trainers to the tanks,” Gault said Thursday. “But we are interested in doing it in a relatively short period of time.”

Banned After Accidents

Sea World banned trainers from entering the water with the huge whales in December after the park revealed that San Diego trainers had been involved in 14 accidents between August and December, some of which produced severe injuries.

Jan Schultz, then president of San Diego Sea World, chief trainer David Butcher and marine biologist Lanny Cornell were fired in the wake of that series of accidents. Schultz, a 17-year veteran at Sea World, subsequently filed a lawsuit against the park alleging breach of contract and breach of good faith, and seeking unspecified damages.

During a rare press conference at the San Diego park on Dec. 8, Jovanovich told reporters that he thought trainers should “never again enter” the whales’ pools, either during training sessions or performances.

However, Jovanovich also acknowledged that Sea World executives believed that a permanent ban was “too Draconian.”

When killer whale trainers return to the water, they will do so in a severely restricted manner, Gault said.

Only trainers with suitable experience will enter the tanks, and only with “an animal that we’re comfortable with,” he said. “There will be some procedures where a trainer will be in the water and others where they will not be in the water.”

By the end of next week, three of the seven whales that have been in San Diego will have been shipped to parks in Ohio and Texas. That will leave the San Diego park with four whales--Orky, Corky, Shamu and Kandu. Orky was the whale involved in a highly publicized accident on Nov. 21 that left a trainer hospitalized with serious injuries.

Those transfers “will get our (whale) population down to a more manageable size,” Gault said. With that smaller population, Sea World’s remaining whales should behave with “more predictability and consistency,” he said.

In addition to reducing the whale population, Sea World’s executives have spent the last three months “working on an evaluation of our training staff and their experience level,” Gault said. “We’ve been ensuring that we have the proper trainers” working with the large whales.