Yep, it’s huge! And the locals were so thrilled to have Disney buy the land that, as an additional incentive, the county gave Disney “sovereignty” same as a city. So Disney itself has the power to regulate its own building codes, zoning codes, and anything else that a city might govern. To a significant extent, this is a case of “We don’t need to obey the law – we are the law!”
When I was in Florida a few years ago, we went swimming with the manatees at Crystal River (legally the only place in the world you can do this). It was amazing and I highly recommend it, but I remember the guide talking about alligators. He said “If you are in the (fresh) water in Florida, you have gators with you, guaranteed.”
I admit as a Canadian girl, it did make me a bit apprehensive with my daughter beside me, but I never actually saw one. Even though I knew they were there.
This story is so sad.
It’s not just alligators that are an issue. The rumor is that Disney closed their River Country park back in 2001 because of the risk of deadly infection caused by an amoeba (Naegleria fowleri), which is found in warm bodies of fresh water. The disease is fairly rare, but at least one 11-year old boy was reportedly killed by such an infection at the River Country park back in 1980.
The amoeba is commonly referred to as the “brain-eating amoeba” and one can be infected if contaminated water is inadvertently inhaled up the nose. If infected, the mortality rate is near 100%. Disney’s River Country park was located in neighboring Bay Lake, and used partially-filtered water from the lake for the attractions.
There’s also a lot of boat traffic on these lakes, with numerous ferries shuttling people around. I’ve been to WDW over 10 times now, and would never consider going swimming in either Seven Seas Lagoon or Bay Lake.
David Hiden, whose 5 year old son was approached by alligators at Disney World last year was told by resort officials that the gators were “resident pets” and that they were harmless.
Exactly. While I would never have considered going swimming at any of the “beaches” on these lakes, I have seen people relaxing on the beach chairs and recliners on the sand, and thought nothing of it.
I agree that Disney needs to post better signs, and probably need to install some kind of barrier between the water and the beaches. However, note that there is no easy way to keep alligators out of water bodies in Florida, especially in a natural-looking lagoon. Steel grates in the canals won’t do it, because the alligators can walk as well as swim. Floridians have found alligators in their swimming pools, after all.
One issue that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the fact that the number of alligators has greatly increased in recent years in Florida. Back when WDW was built, the number of alligators was at an all-time low due to rampant eradication efforts. Since then, conservation efforts have greatly increased the number of alligators in the state. It may be simply that the risk has increased gradually, and something that used to be a small risk has increased to a larger (but still small) risk over the decades.
On a related note, I read somewhere recently the number of alligators in the man-made Seven Seas Lagoon was thought to be fairly low due to all of the boat traffic. If the number of alligators in the state has generally been increasing, population pressure could have pushed them into the lagoon.
russian heel, the reason people are siding with the parents here is not because they’re white. It’s because they followed the directions. The signs said “no swimming”, and they and the kid were not swimming. If the signs meant to say “stay out of the water”, then they should have said that.
Yup!
And if the signs were meant to imply “danger, alligators” then they should have said that too.
Exactly. But some people will always see things as black and white, so to speak.
That might exempt them from Orlando ordinances, but not state or federal, and possibly not county.
An incident reported on the news tonight, a girl in IIRC Ohio died after one of these infections from a water park somewhere up north.
Also, for the first time there is a medication that can actually treat this. Before it was basically a death sentence. There’s an effort underway to distribute the meds from the CDC to hospitals to have on hand.
No-one reads signs. Anyone who works in interpretation or parks or museums knows this. You can have the biggest, best, most well-designed, legible, understandable signage, and great swathes of visitors will walk blithely right past it.
There’s no difference between signs that says “no swimming” or “danger danger killer aliigators live here” because they aren’t being read.
And that’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes accidents happen. The litigiousness of American society has led to this bizarre need to assign and apportion blame.
In Florida, there are alligators, which sometimes act according to their nature.
Ugh, I HATE this article. The guy, who is not an alligator expert, saw an alligator moving and interpreted its behavior as threatening. OF COURSE the receptionist (or whoever he told at the hotel) isn’t going to lend this any credence - he or she is probably used to placating visitors who are afraid of alligators, who believe that the presence of alligators is inherently a threat.
What did this lawyer expect Disney to do? Kill every alligator in the lake? Put up more signs (which no one reads)? No, he just gets to feel important when he talks to the news media about how “He warned them!” and “If only they’d listened to me!”
Of course. I did not offer the information to suggest that Disney is immune to liability claims or regulatory enforcement actions.
I merely wanted to underscore the fact that Disney swings a really big stick, and not just because it generates enormous piles of money.
Also, it will be quite interesting to see exactly how these issues shake out. The liability (or failure to uphold a standard of care), any resulting civil penalties, and potential regulatory changes may have implications for a host of other businesses in Florida. This will be a “If they could do that to Disney, what could they do to my business?” moment. For instance, will golf courses begin to fence water hazards? Will outdoor recreational areas in general undergo a paroxysm of sign-making and release-printing? We shall see.
I hope not. Alligators are indigenous to Florida and very rarely attack people. See my post above to note that they are among the least likely supposed aggressive animals to attack, let alone kill, anyone in the U.S. They rank well below bees, dogs, snakes, bears, scorpions and even centipedes. Deer are among the biggest animal death threats of all by a large margin.
What is anyone supposed to do? It is central Florida and wild animals thankfully still thrive there even though Walt Disney tried to completely sterilize it. Thankfully, nature is stronger than that and the alligator population recovery since the 1970’s is a resounding success story.
It is tragic that a little boy was killed but there is little that can be done about that at an infrastructure level. You can’t fence them out or control all of them. They can climb fences just fine because young males need new territory and they are more agile and smarter than most people give them credit for even if they just lie around most of them time when they find a new home. Fencing water hazzards on gold courses isn’t an option for a variety of reasons.
A better statement is to tell people that this is Florida and there are lots of exotic wild animals all around you. They could be alligators, coral snakes, rattlesnakes, water moccasins, sharks, wasps, bees or invasive species like Burmese pythons plus many more. It is your responsibility to take proper precautions because wild animals are unpredictable by definition. That is the stance they take in Louisiana which has a similar situation and people rarely get attacked by anything there and almost never by alligators even though there are more of them there.
I would solve the problem with a pamphlet at the airport entitled “Pay attention to your surroundings: Why Florida itself is not a carefully controlled theme park.”
You are overstating things when you say no-one reads signs. Plenty of people read and follow warning signs. I know I do.
Assuming that “the public” are irresponsible, and so businesses have no duty to warn of known hazards because such warnings will be ignored anyway - well, that’s a pretty big assumption.
By the same token, we ought to credit the public with some intelligence, and not mindlessly slap warning signs and labels on every damn thing. “Knife is sharp, do not stick in eye” isn’t necessary.
Warning signs should be used where there is a real gap between the reasonable knowledge of the property owner, and that of visitors - where the property owners know, or ought to know, of something that could be dangerous, but where visitors could be excused for not knowing that same thing.
This is a good case.
The hotel knew or ought to have known of this potential danger. We have heard at length that everyone in Florida knows about alligators and water; about how the Disney lake was connected to the water system; and about how alligators pose a small, but noticeable, threat to young children. Disney “did up” the beach as a play area, with deck chairs and cabanas (allegedly). Therefore, Disney ought to have known families would hang out at the “beach” they created - that was why they created it. On a beach, kids splash and play at the water’s edge - that’s what one does at a beach.
On the flipside, Disney knows that its patrons come from all over the continent and the world. Families come from places that do not have alligators. They could not be reasonably expected to know of the existence of this potential hazard. It is no answer to this to assert that ‘everyone in Florida’ knows about this, because the patrons were not expected to be only from Florida.
It is this gap between what the Hotel owners reasonably know, and what their visitors could be expected to know, that makes some sort of notification (such as a sign) necessary. Disney ought not to be liable for an attack by a wild animal it has no control over. But it ought to be liable, I would say, for failing to warn guests so they could avoid such an attack.
No “allegedly” about it. Links to pictures of the beach have been posted in this thread. Lightnin was at that beach a week before this happened. The beach was created by Disney for the use of their hotel guests, that’s an incontrovertible fact.
I stand corrected then; strike “allegedly”.
One thing they can do and, IMHO would be reasonable and fairly inexpensive, while maintaining the “natural paradise” feel of the resort, would be to install a barrier fence in the lagoon around the beach, about three feet high in two feet of water, so that it extended about a foot above the surface of the water. Sure, it would not keep all the alligators out, but any that did enter the fenced area would be easily spotted and Disney management could take appropriate action. Yeah, people would still have to keep a lookout, but it would make it hard for a 'gator to sneak into “striking range” of the beach without being noticed.
True enough, but in my experience, people do pay attention to the “No Swimming” signs.
I’ve been to WDW more than ten times over the last decade, and have stayed at all of the other Disney resorts on this same body of water (i.e. the Wilderness Lodge, the Polynesian Resort, and the Contemporary Resort). While I have seen people occasionally utilize the beaches, I have never seen anyone swimming or entering the water. It would have been remarkable if I’d seen a kid wading in the water. In my experience, it’s well-known that the area is not suitable for swimming.
Personally, the risk of alligators wouldn’t have been first on my mind before last week, but I would have been mindful of the possibility (it being Florida and all) especially at dusk, as well as the amoebas in the water that I mentioned before, snakes, boat traffic, the lack of a roped-off area for swimming, the “No Swimming” signs themselves, etc.
What I do find a bit concerning is that I never would have been particularly worried (prior to this incident) about utilizing the beach, or with a kid playing in the sand, whereas there’s really nothing to stop an alligator from attacking near the water’s edge, even if you do stay out of the water.
That’s one of the several serious differences between this case and that of the zoo gorilla. The gorilla would never have had an opportunity to strike outside it’s living space. You really had to try to get attacked.
How about not creating a beach area, which conveys the notion of playing in the water? How about providing a dry grassy area between any resort recreational areas and the water, so that any alligators are easily detected, and cannot strike from nowhere in the areas you designate for guest relaxation? Or as suggested, a low fence inside the water line primarily to keep alligators from performing an ambush attack? There are many mitigating actions that can be done without doing anything to the alligator population except removing the ones that hang out on the patio.
They could put those fliers in every hotel room on your pillow, so when you check in and enter your room, it is obvious. Make sure it has a prominent and enticing cover to ensure the guests read it. Something like “Mickey wants you to know…”*
Except that might interfere with the illusion they are trying to create for their guests.
- “Free porn” wouldn’t fit their image.