Dear company that’s been in the news lately because of an accident:
You know it’s all your fault. Now the government is learning that it’s all your fault. Hope you have a good fuckin’ attorney, and I mean the criminial defense kind, because for once, you are NOT going to be able to pin this shit on your theme park workers.
That is all.
May we have a link please?
Are we talking about Disney?
hajario
September 12, 2003, 3:01am
5
I guess that you mean the Disneyland train wreck. Why not just print their name?
Haj
And why all the anger? Just because they’re a big company? Would you be this pissed off if it was a little amusement park that had the accident?
Here’s a link if you’re interested.
Ease up, gang, Morrigoon*
Next pit’ll be her keyboard.
click profile and look for the homepage
Are you crazy? They have lawyers with frickin’ laser beams on their heads.
friedo
September 12, 2003, 4:10am
9
Disney Disney Disney Disney.
[sub]friedo dissapears in a poof of smoke [/sub]
As distasteful as I find Disney, I must admit that their theme parks have a superb safety record overall. I also think it’s fair to assume that when you make money by hurling people through the air in manners that would make Sir Isaac Newton cringe, you can expect to have an accident now and then, despite the best precautions.
CarnalK
September 12, 2003, 2:45pm
10
Hey Parents! Don’t feel like dragging your kids to an amusement park next summer? Well turn them on to this site:
Theme Park Insider: Verified Accident List
I heard that the park has only had 10 deaths since it opened in 1955 (total,including non-ride related). That almost seems too low. Wonder if they drag heart attack sufferers to the property line.
*Originally posted by Morrigoon *
Right…you do know that a corporation, despite it’s legal status, is not an actual “person”? It is an organization of workers, managers, and other employees, several of which may or may not be responsible for such an accident.
Originally posted by CarnalK
I heard that the park has only had 10 deaths since it opened in 1955 (total,including non-ride related). That almost seems too low. Wonder if they drag heart attack sufferers to the property line. **
Relevant Snopes link: http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/declare.htm
Thank you so much. I know have an Altoid particle lodged in my left nostril from trying to suppress my snort of laughter since I am at work.
mhendo
September 12, 2003, 7:02pm
14
Well, you may not be far off the mark. The following are excerpts from a book i own called Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World , by The Project on Disney (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
Disney protects its borders. When problems occur, something that might require official mediation between inside and out, various cogs of the company’s machinery kick into gear. The ocncern is to let nothing enter or exit the property unregulated or uncontrolled. The includes, apparently, the dead and dying. Says one retail clerk: “If someone was down, say someone had a heart attack in the shop, then you call a supervisor in. They told us we were to call a supervisor and then call the ambulance.” (She went on to assure me that she never followed this rule.) Another worker was involved in a car accident caused by a drunk Disney who was “fired on the spot.” “Within ten minutes,” she said, “there were sixty to seventy people there from Disney…An hour and ten minutes later the police were called.” Not to worry, however, if this happens to you, since no one actually dies on Disney property. It’s company policy: when asked at one of Disney’s pricey management seminars whether anyone ever died at Disney World, the group leader, on cue from a supervisor sitting in the back of the room, said simply, “No.” If guests have the nerve to die, they wait, like unwanted calories, until they’ve crossed the line and can do so safely off property:
"We had a guy last summer who went to EPCOT, stood in front of the golf ball, and blew his head off. But he didn’t die. He stood right there in front of all those tourists and went ‘cluck’ and brains blew everywhere. But he didn’t die there. The medic told me they are not allowed to let them die there. Keep them alive by artifical means until they’re off Disney property, like there’s an imaginary lline in the road and they go, ‘He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s dead.’ "
And this apparently applies to a variety of situations.
…[T]he prevalence of kidnapping at Disney is an open secret in Orlando, so much so that some there call it an urban myth, and it’s in this corridor between the known/not known that Disney is able to define itself so positively. The rumors fly without ever landing anywhere: the toddler who drowned after crawling under the rope fence at the Fisherman’s Wharf; the employee who, in the parking lot of Pleasure Island, pumped five bullets into another in a jealous spat over a third. (“He threw the gun in the lake and went for a beer. Nobody knew for three days.” The girl was “carted out of state so she wouldn’t get involved. The rule now is if you ever bring it up you’re fired on the spot.”) There are rapes along the park paths; smashed windshields in the parking lots; beaten bodies in the bushes. There is counterfeiting and armed robbery in the shops (tickets mainly) and the tunnels (cash from the Brinks truck).
<snip>
Occasionally one of these disasters flashes across the news wires as a reality check, though one that absolves Disney of responsibility. Everyone remembers the girl who fell while trying to jump cars in the Haunted Mansion and sliced off half her face in the process. Or the brother and sister con-team who tried to fake a rape in one of the resort hotels with the hoipe of cashing in on a negligence suit. No one, however, has ever heard the story of the young mother whose rented paddle boat was sucked into the wake of the Empress Lilly where, before the eyes of her gasping seven-year-old, the ship’s paddle wheel chopped her quite in half. What one learns from all this discretion and calculated indiscretion is that Disney gets to control its own place because it can and because it can so well , even when it does so by defining the terms of its own success or at least the conditions under which that success will be understood.
Quotes from pp. 115-117.
To be fair, i should also add that Snopes has dealt with some of these issues, and offers what is probably a more fully-rounded explanation.
Declared deaths on Disney property Death of a Disney employee, crushed by a rotating wall Four year old girl dies on “Body Wall” ride, EPCOT Deaths on Disneyland attractions
I have been unable to find anything confirming the story of the woman cut in half by the paddle wheel.
