Alton Towers owner Merlin Group fined £5m for Smiler crash

The rollercoaster collision was found to be due to a ‘series of errors by staff’

The owners of Alton Towers, Merlin, have been fined £5 million with costs of £69,955, following a rollercoaster collision in June 2015, which left 16 people injured, a number of them seriously.

Two young women on the Smiler ride suffered leg amputations and others suffered severe injuries when their carriage collided with a stationary carriage on the same track on 2 June 2015.

Stafford Crown Court heard that on the day of the incident engineers overrode the Smiler’s control system without the knowledge and understanding to ensure it was safe to do so.

A Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation found no fault with the track, the cars, or the control system that keeps the cars apart from each other when the ride is running.

Investigators found the root cause to be “a lack of detailed, robust arrangements for making safety critical decisions”. The whole system, from training through to fixing faults, was found to not be strong enough to stop a series of errors by staff when working with people on the ride.

Following the incident Alton Towers made technical improvements to the ride and changed their systems.

In April, Merlin Attractions pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act.

Neil Craig, head of operations for HSE in the Midlands said: “On 2 June last year Merlin Attractions Operations failed to protect their customers, they badly let them down.

“This avoidable incident happened because Merlin failed to put in place systems to allow engineers to work safely on the ride while it was running. This made it all too easy for a whole series of unchecked mistakes, not just one push of a button, to result in tragic consequences.

“Since the incident Alton Towers have made improvements to the ride and their safety protocols, and the lessons learned have been shared industry wide.”

Nick Varney, chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, said that from the beginning the company has accepted full responsibility for the accident and has tried to make the “healing compensation process as trouble free as possible for all of those involved” and will continue to support those involved for as “long as they need it”.

Varney added: “Alton Towers - and indeed the wider Merlin Group - are not emotionless corporate entities. They are made up of human beings who care passionately about what they do. In this context, the far greater punishment for all of us is knowing that on this occasion we let people down with devastating consequences. It is something we will never forget and it is something we are utterly determined will never be repeated.”