Disneyland Casualty Back on Job

Christine Carpenter, the Disneyland worker seriously injured in the Columbia tall ship accident that killed a park patron 15 months ago, has always insisted she would return to work some day despite numerous surgeries to rebuild her mangled left foot.

That day arrived this week when she checked in at Disneyland’s administrative offices and walked, with a cane, through the park where she had been an assistant attractions manager. After greeting her old friends Monday, she drove away--and began telecommuting.

“They gave her a computer, and she’s working from home,” said one of her colleagues. “There’s no way she can go back to work managing an area” in the park, the colleague said, because such jobs involve walking “miles and miles a day.” The colleague, who asked to remain anonymous, didn’t know what Carpenter’s at-home job entailed.

Carpenter, who turns 32 in two weeks, couldn’t be reached for comment. Park spokesman Ray Gomez declined to describe her duties, saying Carpenter desired to protect her privacy.

State investigators blamed Disney’s “inadequate” training of Carpenter for the accident.

Because of a scheduling mistake, Carpenter was filling in for a regular worker on Christmas Eve 1998. As the Columbia, which cruises a circular channel on an underwater rail, approached its dock, she dropped a mooring line over a cleat on its bow before the boat came to a standstill.

When the bolts securing the cast-iron cleat sheared off, the line catapulted a 9-pound hunk of metal into the crowd, where it struck Luan Phi Dawson, a 33-year-old Microsoft computer programmer and test engineer who was on vacation.

Dawson died of head injuries, and his wife, Lieu Thuy Vuong, suffered severe facial injuries. The cleat also struck Carpenter, breaking her left ankle and tearing away parts of her foot.

It was the only time since the park opened in 1955 that a Disneyland visitor was killed without having done anything to contribute to the accident, park officials said.

Three months later, Cal/OSHA ruled that Carpenter never had hands-on training docking the Columbia. The state agency fined Disneyland $12,500, the maximum for what it called “serious” violations of inadequate training and misuse of equipment.

Carpenter’s mother, Susan Carpenter, said at the time that the family felt vindicated that the ultimate blame had been placed on Walt Disney Co., not her daughter.

The mother declined to comment Wednesday.

An acquaintance said that Carpenter sometimes seemed groggy from pain medication but always kept in touch with former co-workers and, to the amazement of some, always insisted she would rejoin them.