Footage of the Alton Towers rollercoaster crash that left five passengers with life-changing injuries has been released for the first time, showing the moment a full carriage collided at high speed with an empty train on the Smiler ride in June last year.
The collision had the same impact as a 1.5-tonne family car crashing at 90mph, a court heard on Monday, leaving several passengers with horrific physical and psychological injuries.
The footage was released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which investigated the crash, during the sentencing of Alton Towers owner Merlin Attractions at Stafford crown court.
Vicky Balch and Leah Washington, who each lost a leg in the crash, were in court for the start of the two-day court hearing, along with Joe Pugh, Daniel Thorpe and Chandaben Chauhan, who were also seriously hurt.
The court heard the victims were “frustrated” that there was nearly a 20-minute delay before the first 999 call was made to emergency services, despite a crowd of shocked onlookers gathering within seconds of the collision at 1.51pm. Paramedics first arrived at 2.37pm – nearly 50 minutes after the crash, the court was told.
The footage shows for the first time the catastrophic series of events leading up to the collision on 2 June last year. It shows an empty train starting a test run around the 14-loop rollercoaster at 1.40pm before it came to a complete stop – known as “valley-ing” – in the bottom-most part of the Cobra Roll area of the ride at 1.41pm.
Wind gusts of 46mph caused the empty test train to stall, but staff failed to notice that it was still it on the track, the court heard.
The judge, Michael Chambers QC, was told that warning signs on the £18m ride were dismissed by staff as false alarms and they overrode a security feature that halted the ride.
The footage shows a carriage containing Balch, Washington and the other passengers being held at the top of the first loop for nearly eight minutes before it was eventually released at 1.51pm, when staff overrode the safety mechanism and the carriage plunged down the loop and smashed into the empty car.
The two trains were “meshed together”, crushing the legs of those on the front row and took nearly a minute and a half to come to a complete stop.
Horrified crowds could be seen gathering near the rollercoaster seconds after the collision as the seriously injured passengers screamed for help.
Barrister Bernard Thorogood, prosecuting for HSE, said there was a “frustration of those on the train that those on the ground did not grasp the enormity of the injuries” suffered by those on the ride.
The court heard that the collision between the two carriages took place at 1.51pm, with the first 999 call made 17 minutes later at 2.08pm. A community responder was on site at 2.09pm, a helicopter arrived by 2.37pm and the police at 2.57pm.
Merlin Attractions faces a potential multimillion pound fine when it is sentenced later after pleading guilty to breaking health and safety laws. The company said it had accepted responsibility for the crash from the day it happened, as it repeated its apology to the victims.
Thorogood said that although there had been “a number of human errors”, the “fault here is with the employers” and not individuals”.
He 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, adding: “The fault is with the defendant for not devising a scheme, for not guiding the work of the engineers.”
The engineers had reset 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
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 ride, which was not supposed to operate in wind speeds above 34mph, stayed open despite another attraction, the Skyride, being closed more than an hour earlier due to the gusts of 46mph. It was the high winds that caused the empty test car to stall, the court heard.
Thorogood said Merlin fell “far short” when it came to governing the inevitable need for engineers from Alton Towers’ technical services’s department to fix faults on the ride.
Four engineers on the day had not read or seen the Smiler’s operation instructions, the court heard, and two had not seen the ride’s risk assessment.
A 254-page expert report, commissioned by the HSE, found that there were four human errors in the run-up to the crash yet criticised senior management for their “manifestly inadequate” governance of its technical monitoring.
It said: “I am concerned that senior management appears never to have become aware, or failed to act upon, the great discrepancy between the robust arrangements put in place by the operations department and the manifestly inadequate arrangements of the technical services department”.
The report concluded that it was “very likely that this accident would have been avoided” if there had been adequate training in the technical services department.
Alton Towers has instituted 30 changes following the crash to improve the safety of the ride, the court heard.
