Disney Plans Ride by Ride Safety Check

A month after a tourist was fatally injured at Disneyland, the theme park is launching a ride by ride review of how all its attractions are run. It already is changing procedures for the Columbia Sailing Ship, where the accident occurred, the park’s new operations chief said Wednesday.

Disneyland needs more experienced crew members running the rides, and it is “not important” whether the changes end up costing the company more money, Michael T. Berry said.

“If it requires changes or modifications, then we will modify it and retrain the cast members and managers as needed,” he said. “We intend for our guests to always have a safe environment.”

Ten days into his new job, Berry said he could give few details about the changes in store. But one of them, he said, will be that dock workers no longer will use a rope and cleat on the Columbia to stop the tall ship.

A Cal/OSHA investigation of the fatal injury is focusing in part on whether Disneyland was improperly halting the ship with a cleat, a metal piece with projecting prongs for tying up the boat. The cleat is meant only for mooring, not stopping a boat, a Cal/OSHA officials said last week. In addition, the agency is looking at whether the assistant manager docking the ship at the time of the accident had been properly trained.

A Duvall, Wash., man suffered fatal brain injuries on the dock Dec. 24 when the mooring line stretched taut, ripped the cleat free and threw it into a crowd waiting to board the ship. The man’s wife was seriously injured, as was the assistant manager who attached the line, Christine Carpenter.

Workers said Carpenter, 30, was filling in for a crew member scheduled to arrive later, a substitution that had become more common after cutbacks in staffing levels.

Berry, a food service expert who joined Disney in 1996 and was promoted to senior vice president of operations last week, said he wasn’t familiar enough with rides or staffing levels to comment on exactly what contributed to the accident.

He said that even before the accident, Disneyland already was planning to review its ride procedures as it gears up to open a second theme park in Anaheim in 2001.

“It would be fair to say the incident on the Columbia caused us to concentrate more energies on it, accelerate the pace and the urgency,” Berry said. He said procedures “are good, but we want to know if they can be better.” He said every ride in the park will be reviewed and possibly reworked. He said “leads,” the Disney term for a foreman or forewoman, will be restored on rides where they had been phased out over the past two years. The leads are people who have a great deal of experience running the rides.

But recently, the park had given assistant managers such as Carpenter, many with little practical experience in operating rides, positions of authority over several rides. Berry said he didn’t want to eliminate assistant managers, but wanted to make sure rides were led by workers with the most detailed knowledge of the attractions.

He said he has met with employees who were disgruntled by staffing cutbacks and the reliance on assistant managers, “and they firmly believe there’s a body of knowledge there that we need to tap into.” They’re right, he said, and it is “not important” whether the changes end up costing Disneyland more money.

“When you get in your car and turn it on, you know the hum of your engine and what it’s supposed to sound like, where I might not,” he said. “The leads gave us that knowledge, and perhaps we have lost a little of that knowledge.”

Berry said he intends to establish a “ride hierarchy,” with new employees trained first on simple rides and working up to more complicated ones.

One of the concerned workers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he was encouraged by the meeting with Berry and the return to a seniority-based crew system.

“I shouldn’t have to train someone who was selling plush [toys] a week ago how to be my foreman,” the veteran ride operator said.