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Man Dies in Ocean Park Haunted House

This is REALLY bad news - it's one of those things that should NEVER happen. Alone-based experiences are the easiest to keep track of every single person that's inside the attraction, it's truly beyond me how this has happened.
 
Also, heavy machinery in a place where you can just stumble into moving parts. That sort of stuff should always be behind locked bars, even if the room it's in is locked as well. Access to a room with machinery should always require a key, and access to the machinery itself a different key. The fact that this haunted house apparently had neither makes it even more baffling that guests weren't monitored. Then again, the places that skimp on one such thing tends to skimp on others too. The local government might as well send some food hygiene inspectors to the park while they're at it.
 
I'm with @Lofty and @Pokemaniac.

Tragic news, of course, but this really should have been avoidable. There's no way the designers, inspectors and operators aren't all equally liable here.
 
Must have been a terrifying experience, if you are alone it would be incredibly hard to realise the difference between a well designed scare attraction and what sounds like a heavy duty plant / machine room. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a scene similar within the actual attraction. For all you know you are continuing with the attraction, yet in reality you are away from it and heading into dangerous back of house areas. At what point do you draw the line and turn back given you are alone?
 
Pokemaniac said:
Also, heavy machinery in a place where you can just stumble into moving parts. That sort of stuff should always be behind locked bars, even if the room it's in is locked as well. Access to a room with machinery should always require a key, and access to the machinery itself a different key. The fact that this haunted house apparently had neither makes it even more baffling that guests weren't monitored. Then again, the places that skimp on one such thing tends to skimp on others too. The local government might as well send some food hygiene inspectors to the park while they're at it.
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The park isn't really a CHEAP DEATH TRAP - they have some of the best visitor numbers in the World and have quite a bit of cash that goes in to good investments (nice animal exhibits, they have a B&M etc) and their Halloween event is big and has money put into it.

Obviously this shouldn't have happened but let's not jump to conclusions that they're skimping and it's a money thing, I'm not sure we'd jump to the same conclusions at a similar scale Western park.
 
Saw this on the Theme Park Accidents Facebook group. On my phone, so not going to bother searching to see where they got it from.



Makes sense how it happened, but not how it was possible to access that area. The whole thing was preview/special invite though, so maybe it just wasn't as ready as it should have been.

Edit - found it here:

http://sc.mp/UEPVRX
 
'Ocean Park has announced they may donate the coffin that killed Cheung to his family, for the funeral service, as a gesture of good will'

This is a genuine quote from the Amusement Ride Accidents Facebook Post that @gavin mentioned!
 
Ben said:
Obviously this shouldn't have happened but let's not jump to conclusions that they're skimping and it's a money thing, I'm not sure we'd jump to the same conclusions at a similar scale Western park.
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Doesn't have to be a money thing, could also be an organizatorial thing (company bureaucracy could be a hassle, for instance). A failure of routines. Poor routines to begin with. It could be a one-in-a-milllion occurrence, or likely to happen again tomorrow by coincidence. No place or organization is immune to poor decisions.

And yeah, I agree that there's no need to think it couldn't have happened in the West too. Heck, just have a look at CF's Accidents page. You have the common "Guy walks where he shouldn't go, gets struck by attraction and dies" thing happening anywhere, but also the occasional "Vital structural part snaps, attraction falls" type of accidents too, or "Engineers ignore an alarm and dispatch a train full of passengers into a valleyed train". I've seen enough examples of bad HSE/OSHA compliance in the building industry over here (which generally tends to be super serious about stuff like that) to know that it could really have happened anywhere.

Areas where a mechanism drops suddenly from the ceiling (or anywhere machinery is prone to sudden movements) should really be locked away. Preferably in its own cage, inside a locked room. Physical barriers, not just warning signs. Maybe a sound alarm too. It apparently wasn't done here, and it wasn't done in that German assembly plant where a car manufacturing robot bludgeoned a guy to death last year. It doesn't mean that German car factories are death traps, or that the specific plant doesn't care about safety. But it means that somewhere, a major screw-up happened, and it could and should have been avoided.

It probably was tactless of me to suggest that negligience extends to the rest of the park, though. I'll give you that.
 
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