Disneyland to Review How All Rides Are Run

A month after a tourist was killed at Disneyland, the theme park is launching a ride-by-ride review of how all its attractions are run, and already is changing its 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 focused in part on whether Disneyland was improperly halting the ship with a cleat, a metal piece with prongs for tying up a 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 some cutbacks in staffing levels.

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

Asked if he would blame the accident on improper procedures at the Columbia, he replied: “I was not there. I would not even want to comment on that.”

Berry said that even before the accident, Disneyland was planning to review its ride procedures as it gears up to open a second Anaheim theme park 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.” So every ride in the park will be reviewed and possibly reworked.

He said “leads,” the Disneyland term for a foreman or forewoman, will be restored on rides where they had been phased out over the last two years. The leads are people who have a great deal of experience actually running the rides.

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 as possible.

Berry also said he had met with employees who had been 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.

“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.”

He intends to establish a “ride hierarchy,” with employees trained first on simple rides, then 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,” said the veteran ride operator.

Another source familiar with the rides said procedures for operating the Columbia and the Mark Twain, a paddle boat that uses the same dock, have been abandoned. He said devising new procedures and retraining workers could take six to eight weeks.

“At this point, no one has any knowledge--officially--on how to do things any more,” the source said. “And everyone who ever worked those boats will have to be retrained.”

The accident has renewed interest in some quarters about reviving legislation to require state inspections of rides at amusement parks like Disneyland. Currently, only movable carnival-style rides are inspected.

The head of Disneyland’s Orange County rival, Knott’s Berry Farm, has said he would support such regulation, but Berry said he’s not yet knowledgeable enough about rides to say.

Disney’s investigation of the accident is continuing, along with Cal/OSHA’s. A Cal/OSHA spokesman said Disneyland has cooperated fully with the state probe and estimated that it might take another month to be completed.

* OVERSIGHT BACKED: O.C.’s two Democratic lawmakers come out in favor of state regulation of park rides. A15