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M&D's Incident June 2016

IanSR said:
No that was business rates, what @DiogoJ42 if referencing is the year they were fined the £5Mill they also received a £5Mill tourism tax credit, the details are in the forum here, in the court case thread.
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Ahh, actually I do think I rememebr that now. Completely slipped my mind. Thanks for clarifying! :)
 
This payout is direct to the goverment if I read it right. They are also paying the victims compensation which I would presume is taken into account along with the size of the buisness and the turnover when allocating a fine as I don't believe they have the power to bankrupt a buisness as discussed in the Drayton thread with regards to the rapids incident there.
 
Hopefully it isn't like banking fines which see them be used for quantitive easing lol.

Oh and the Government most surely do have the power to close down a business overnight, they don't even need to bankrupt it, they can just swoop in with a high court injunction and close everything down. Back in the 80/90's this was the remit of the DTI, I guess whatever morphed out of that would have the power now.
 
The safety inspector who passed the ride 16 days before its derailment has managed to avoid jail.

A man responsible for inspecting a roller coaster which crashed at M&Ds Theme Park avoided a jail sentence on Monday.

Craig Boswell signed off the Tsunami ride as safe without having a vital report from another inspection company.
Nine people, most of them children, were injured in the horrific crash at the Strathclyde Park funfair in June 2016.

Earlier this year M&D Leisure was fined £65,000 at Hamilton Sheriff Court after failing to ensure the ride was maintained in an efficient state.

At the same court Boswell, 56, of Calderpark Road, Uddingston, admitted an offence under health and safety legislation.

He was ordered to carry out 160 hours of unpaid community work as an alternative to custody.

The court heard welding repairs carried out to axles on the ride’s individual passenger cars were “inadequate and unsound”.

M&D Leisure had employed contractors to carry out repairs and the ride had been passed safe, but the company accepted it should have involved the manufacturer or another “competent person” in the process.

Boswell, a self employed inspector, admitted that he hadn’t obtained a report by another inspection company before the ride was given a compliance certificate which indicated it was safe to operate.

He was said to be “remorseful” over the omission and is paying £14,000 towards the cost of the Health and Safety Executive’s investigation into the accident.

His lawyer, Gavin Anderson, told the court: “But for some road traffic matters, he has no history of criminal offending.

“It is deeply regrettable that he finds himself in this position.”

Sheriff Thomas Millar said Boswell was guilty of “medium culpability” and a prison sentence had to be considered.

But he told the accused: “I don’t think it is appropriate. I can take a step back from that and impose a period of unpaid work instead.”
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Personally I think he is lucky to escape at least a suspended jail term, both himself and M&D without doubt cut some corners to save time/money. This could have ended up so much worse for those injured, only luck prevented deaths in this accident.

Source
Additional Reading
 
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Well it's a good job, otherwise the jails would be full of MOT inspectors if we jailed everybody for not predicting mechanical failed weeks in advance, I'm not sure how obtains a second opinion on the rides engineering standard would have changed the outcome if he missed the faulty welding too, and afaik there's nothing to suggest the second engineer would have spotted the problem either.
 
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If it's your job to inspect something but part of it falls out of your area of expertise, do you:
  • Arrange for somebody else to inspect that part, then combine their results with yours; or
  • Just say "sod it" and issue the full health report anyway
?
IanSR said:
Well it's a good job, otherwise the jails would be full of MOT inspectors if we jailed everybody for not predicting mechanical failed weeks in advance
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That's not a suitable analogy since MOT testers are capable of inspecting everything without subcontracting part of it, but if they chose not to inspect something which subsequently failed, are they not culpable?
 
IanSR said:
Well it's a good job, otherwise the jails would be full of MOT inspectors if we jailed everybody for not predicting mechanical failed weeks in advance, I'm not sure how obtains a second opinion on the rides engineering standard would have changed the outcome if he missed the faulty welding too, and afaik there's nothing to suggest the second engineer would have spotted the problem either.
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The thing is, if mechanical checks, inspections and good preventative maintenance are carried out properly, then everything should be caught and rectified well in advance of a failure. How many times have you heard of Oblivion's chain snapping? Or the cable breaking on the Skyride? Never! These could happen absolutely, but strong inspection and correction regimes with strong due diligence prevents such things from happening.

It was literally his job to catch these sorts of things. Failures like it did on this ride don't 'just' happen spontaneously or over a few weeks, it would have slowly failed and the signs would have been there for some time that he failed to pick up.

He had one job....
 
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I don't know the full story so yes I am making an assumption, I was working under the assumption he missed the bad weld rather than knew about it and ignored it? Is that correct?
 
M&D's rollercoaster crash victims get £1.2m in damages payouts

Ten victims of the M&D's rollercoaster crash in 2016 have secured £1.2m in damages.

Seven children were among the people injured in the crash at the theme park in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire.

It happened after five gondolas on the Tsunami inverted rollercoaster detached from their rails at a bend and fell to the ground.

The 10 victims have now successfully sued theme park bosses over physical or psychiatric injuries.

M&D's owners have already been fined £65,000 over health and safety breaches.

The company pleaded guilty to charges relating to the Health and Safety at Work Act at Hamilton Sheriff Court in March this year.

More here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-50683944
 
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