webslave

Are we talking about this section? Because, if so, I may not be reading that the same way you are. I don't see anything in that which tells us that in the case of a drop in water level this system would disable the conveyor. Instead, my reading of this is that if there was to be monitoring of the water level it was intended as an efficiency measure, rather than a safety measure. I can't see anything here that indicates as part of the scoping of the project that they considered it a safety measure. Yes, that supports my suggestion that water level monitoring alone was not enough here - the important part is interfacing it to the conveyor system.

Absolutely, the amount of administrative controls in-play here is quite staggering and quaint. I personally also don't see how any remotely competent person could have looked at this ride which has almost no automated safety measures in the last decade (if not longer) and said "yes, it's acceptable to me to put this much reliance into humans". I guess the problem here is that a number of people who were supposedly competent were able to justify it to themselves and those that they report to. I'm not sure I can assume that, since if you're prepared to make that assumption you would surely also have to be prepared to make the assumption that a one-button e-stop would also exist. Reading the information in this report tells me that we could have assumed nothing of these people. It's entirely plausible to me that they would have wired it in and had it flash a light at the control panel - certainly more plausible than the notion that they might have done it right. Please don't read my comments as a mitigation of Dreamworld's actions or an attempt to say that they did not fuck up. They most certainly did, and that's very clear in the report. What I'm encouraging us to do is to actually read the report and understand it rather than just doing media sound-bytes. Dreamworld didn't have one, for sure. They also never managed to engage the services of one. The regulator also failed in their duty to identify any of this, and were in my view wholly deficient too. In fact, one of the more interesting things to come out of this report for me is that I don't believe the ride operators have any significant culpability here.

Let's also bear in mind here that as far as I've read the report doesn't say that automated water level monitoring alone would have been enough to prevent this - it needed to be linked (preferably) to a non-administrative action which would have been to command the PLC to halt the conveyor. It's been a little while since I've read over that part, but I believe there's also some risks with stopping the conveyor, so these also would have had to have been mitigated. To try and dress this as a 'simple' $10k modification is erroneous.

Which is, of course, an interesting thing for him to say when his report actually references risks that had been assessed on the ride by several parties. Perhaps some obtuse wording on his part. For example; Furthermore, later in his report he goes on to state that several purportedly competent persons had looked at the ride and either failed to see the risk, or indeed considered the risk mitigated. I believe the implication here is that none of these were ultimately competent persons in the literal sense. Unfortunately this isn't solely a Dreamworld issue - these issues extended through a number of engineering firms and the OIR itself.

Actually, they knew there was a possibility the rafts could flip and decided they had done enough about it. As we now know, they had not. There's a difficult to determine but nonetheless distinct difference between knowing about a risk and believing you'd done enough to mitigate it and knowing about a risk and continuing to take it even though you know you hadn't done enough to mitigate it. That's why criminal charges are so hard to make stick with this stuff. The reality is that in almost every incident there's a case of an entity thinking they have done enough to mitigate a risk and finding out that they had not, or indeed not even having identified the risk in the first place. For all of the attention and the tragic outcome this unfortunately boils down to both (depending on who we are talking about).

That's a very strange arrangement of fire sensors.

It's easy to look back now and say "$2,500 was what they decided a human life was not even worth" but that's hyperbole. After all, it's no more meaningful than telling someone who had just killed someone in a car wreck that if they had just left 10 seconds later then it wouldn't have happened and that therefore they decided another person's life wasn't worth 10 seconds of their time. Yeah, they totally should have done it but you never know at the time that's what's riding on it. Here's a bit I found interesting;

https://www.courts.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/641830/10545784-final-dreamworld-draft-6-for-upload.pdf

ABC News is mixing narratives:

Wuh-oh:

(because I know you guys are busy I'll try and aggregate social snippets here for people - by all means fix me up if I get it wrong)

Social media reports indicate that the brother of Cindy Low criticized Dreamworld as 'money-driven cowboys' who were more concerned with damage control. He goes on to say that DW isn't interested in paying for his counselling and would rather spend the money on marketing the park.

You can just imagine the conversation at Dreamworld HQ: "Well guys, I'd like to continue developing new experiences for guests and take proactive steps to delivery a new generation of rides and all, but it's this log ride. The log ride is why I can't do anything."

It wouldn't be Parkz if we didn't have people lording insider information over others, only contributing it when they think their authority might be challenged, would it?

"If within the first year" hahaha. Way to back the house!

Other option is to just do Star Tour. It's now my go-to for MW visits.

Also not helped by how it presents to the pathway. Easy for many to pass it by without even realizing it's something to see.

Right before schoolies. Bad for business.

These people know they are running a theme park, don't they?

Pretty much this. It's not on the way to any other ride or attraction. It's not particularly near lockers (which is rather dumb). If you've got a (for example) four year-old and a nine year-old chances are one parent is going to be stuck down in the kids area with the youngie and the other parent is going to be up the front of the park with the older kid - the walk time there is 5-10 minutes, and it doesn't exactly make for a good family day out.