THE boss of Poole’s Merlin Entertainments ignored reporters’ questions about resignation after the company was fined £5million over the Alton Towers rollercoaster disaster.

Chief executive Nick Varney repeated his apology for the crash on the Smiler ride in June last year.

Merlin Attractions had admitted health and safety breaches.

The judge in the case said the company’s safety failure had been “putting at risk the safety of thousands of young people and children”.

Two teenagers - Vicky Balch, then 19, and Leah Washington, then 17 - each lost a leg in the collision in June last year which "changed the lives of some of those injured in the most dramatic way", according to a judge.

Stafford Crown Court heard that the victims had watched with "disbelief and horror" before ploughing into an empty carriage on the track, with the impact likened by the prosecution to a 90mph car crash.

The company, which is based in Poole, was fined after the court heard that an engineer "felt pressure" to get Smiler back into service after it developed a fault shortly before the devastating crash.

An expert witness report, compiled by consultant Stephen Flanagan, also said Alton Towers management linked bonuses to "acceptably low levels of downtime" on their rollercoasters.

Judge Michael Chambers QC called the accident a "catastrophic failure" by the company involving basic health and safety measures.

He said the "obvious shambles of what occurred" could have been "easily avoided" by a suitable written system to deal with ride faults and a proper risk assessment.

The judge added: "This was a needless and avoidable accident in which those injured were fortunate not to have been killed or bled to death."

He said the injured "endured great pain and distress" while waiting for medical help, with the first 999 call not made until 17 minutes after the crash. It took up to five hours for them to be freed from the wreckage.

He added: "Those in the front row bore the brunt of the collision and had their legs crushed in the tangled steel."

He said that all 16 people aboard the carriage had been "injured to various degrees", adding that the company's safety failure had been "putting at risk the safety of thousands of young people and children".

Of those affected, he said the most moving accounts had been from the families of those hurt, some of whom had to give up careers and move home in order to care for their loved ones.

The judge said the relatives and the injured had shown "great courage and fortitude" in the aftermath.

Beginning sentencing, he said: "Human error was not the cause as was suggested by the defendant in an early press release.

"The defendant now accepts the prosecution case that the underlying fault was an absence of a structured and considered system not that of individuals' efforts, doing their best within a flawed system.

"Members of the public have been exposed to serious risk of one train colliding with another with a computer control system was reset, having been overridden to address a fault."

Lawyers for Merlin said that the company had seen a £14 million drop in revenue as a result of the crash, and had "got the message", making 30 changes to safety measures, equipment, and training.

The firm's barrister Simon Antrobus said although there had been human errors which led to the incident, Merlin accepted it was at fault.

Asked by the judge if anyone had resigned over the failings which led up to the horror crash, Mr Antrobus replied: "No".

Merlin Attractions Operations Ltd had already been warned by a judge earlier this year to expect a very large fine for admitting a health and safety breach which led to a carriage on the £18 million ride smashing into an empty car.

Last year, Merlin's resort theme park sector - which includes Chessington and Thorpe Park as well as Alton Towers - made £18m operating profit, with Merlin Entertainments overall recording an operating profit of £291m.


About Merlin

POOLE’S Market Close is the corporate HQ of a company that runs some of the world’s biggest tourist attractions, catering for more than 60million people a year.

They include Alton Towers, Madame Tussauds, Legoland, Sea Life, Blackpool Tower, the London Dungeon and Warwick Castle.

Merlin has continued to trade profitably despite the slump in visitor numbers at Alton Towers following the rollercoaster crash.

In July, it said pre-tax profit was up 0.9 per cent to £50million, despite a 1.1 per cent fall in like-for-like revenue.

Chief executive Nick Varney, whose salary was reported to be £733,000 a year, said in the summer: “Our Midway Attractions operating group has continued to see a challenging market in London, and Alton Towers, whilst seeing some recovery in mainstream leisure visitation, continues to experience significantly lower overall volumes.”

Earlier this year, Merlin opened a Legoland Discovery Centre in Shanghai – the first Legoland attraction in China. Legoland Parks had seen revenue grow by more than 11 per cent, with more Lego movies expected to boost demand further.

With 70 per cent of its profits generated outside the UK, Merlin was expecting the weak pound to boost its bottom line.


Opening the case, barrister Bernard Thorogood said the kinetic energy involved in the crash on June 2 2015 was equivalent to "a family car of 1.5 tons having collided at about 90mph".

He said a test carriage had been sent around the 14-loop ride, but had failed - known as "valley-ing" - in the bottom-most part of the Cobra Roll area of the ride, unseen by ride staff.

The engineers had re-set the ride and overridden a computer system "block-stop" which they believed had halted the ride in error, sending a full 16-seater rollercoaster car around the track and into the empty carriage.

Bournemouth Echo:

Mr Thorogood added: "The subsequent collision was plain to see to some in the train, and I refer to those in the front row's statements, where they speak of their disbelief and horror as they saw ahead up the track the train into which there were going to dive."

The barrister, speaking for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which brought the prosecution, said: "Engineers who came to remedy the situation, regarding the indicated block-stop, thought it was a false one reflecting a recently corrected issue and did not see the stalled train, and proceeded to re-set and re-start the ride, overriding the computer-generated block-stop."

However, he added that although there had been "a number of human errors", the "fault here is with the employers", and not individuals.

Mr Thorogood said engineers, responding to a fault, were "without guidance from above", and had not been given a system to follow to safely deal with the problem on the track.

He added: "The fault is with the defendant for not devising a scheme for not guiding the work of the engineers."

The Recorder of Stafford, Judge Michael Chambers QC, is set to hear evidence of the HSE's investigation into the crash, and mitigation from Merlin, before passing sentence.

Vicky Balch and Leah Washington, who each lost a leg in the crash, were in court for the hearing, along with fellow front-row passengers Joe Pugh and Daniel Thorpe.

Chandaben Chauhan, who was in the second row and was also seriously hurt, also attended.

A court hearing in April this year was told that Merlin had carried its own internal investigation following the incident, which established that a worker manually overrode the rollercoaster's governing computer system.

Indicating a guilty plea to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act, Merlin's barrister told that hearing that the company accepted that additional measures could have been taken to guard against safety risks.

Lawyers for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have said the Smiler ride, which opened in 2013, never had "a proper settled system" for staff to follow when carriages stopped on the track.