Lightwater Valley officials will plead guilty in 2001 death

Posted | Contributed by Jeff

The owners of Lightwater Valley have pleaded guilty to breaching health and safety laws following the death of a 20-year-old student on a roller coaster. Durham University student Gemma Savage was seriously injured when two cars collided on the Treetop Twister ride on June 20, 2001. She died in hospital a day later. Reverchon is also charged, but is in liquidation.

Related parks

Lightwater Valley

The article doesn't detail what happened. Anyone have more information on the cause of the accident?

"...was seriously injured when two cars collided on the Treetop Twister ride at the Lightwater Valley theme park, near Ripon, on June 20, 2001. She died in hospital a day later."

^ Still not very detailed. I would be interested to know where on the ride the collision occured and how two cars ended up in the same block.

I gathered that much Jeff, considering it is two sentences above my question.
*** This post was edited by Fun 11/15/2006 7:55:11 PM ***

Well it sounds to me like there was a serious blocking violation. That's how vehicles collide.

On the off chance you don't understand what I am asking, I was hoping to pinpoint the reason for the cars colliding.

Valleyed? Rollback? Lift failure? Dog failure? Brakes Failure? Derailed? Employee Error? PLC error? Bad sensors? Poor maintenance? Poor design? Poor construction? Guest behavior? Poor operations? Power outage? Weather? Act of god?
External Human interference?

Well if it was up high, it was after the lift, so it had to be a block violation. Block violations happen when you run the ride manually or screw around with its program, or on very rare occasions, when an entire set of block brakes fail.

You must be logged in to post