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| Alton Towers Smiler sentencing: Theme park fined £5m after crash that left five seriously injured | Alton Towers Smiler sentencing: Theme park fined £5m after crash that left five seriously injured |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Alton Towers operator Merlin Attractions has been fined £5m after admitting health and safety breaches led to the crash on the park's Smiler rollercoaster that left five people seriously injured. | |
| A total of sixteen people were injured in the crash in June 2015, with two teenage girls requiring leg amputations. | |
| 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.” | |
| Alton Towers originally blamed the accident on “human error”, but prosecutors argued the fault lay with Merlin Attractions and not individuals. | |
| The Judge 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.” | |
| Following the crash, it took up to five hours for all sixteen people in the rollercoaster car to be freed from the wreckage. | |
| “Those in the front row bore the brunt of the collision and had their legs crushed in the tangled steel,” Judge Chambers said. | |
| Vicky Balch and Leah Washington each lost a leg in the accident, and Joe Pugh, Daniel Thorpe and Chandaben Chauhan were all seriously injured when the fully laden carriage hit a stationary car in front. | |
| 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. | |
| Additional reporting by PA. |