The Dreamworld theme park will remain closed on Wednesday while police examine how four people were killed when a 30-year-old water raft ride malfunctioned on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
Siblings Kate Goodchild, 32, and Luke Dorsett, 35, and his partner, Roozi Araghi, died in the accident on Tuesday afternoon, along with an unnamed woman in her early 40s, when their raft flipped on the Thunder River Rapids ride. Two children aged 10 and 12 who were on the ride are in hospital and receiving counselling.
“It was absolutely traumatic for these children,” the Queensland police assistant commissioner Brian Codd told reporters. “Almost a miracle that anybody came out of that.”
Annastacia Palaszczuk, the premier of Queensland, told Channel Nine: “Our focus at the moment is on the two young children that were on that ride. We need to make sure that they are getting the care and the counselling that they need.”
Dorsett and Goodchild’s mother has told the Courier-Mail in Queensland that the accident had devastated her family.
“I have three children and have lost two of them today – my whole family has been wiped out,” Kim Dorsett said. “I have two granddaughters – an eight-month-old and a 12-year-old – and it truly breaks my heart to know that my eight-month-old is never going to get to know her mum.”
Canberra-based Dorsett and her family were holidaying on the Gold Coast and had extended their stay by a few days.
Gold Coast residents Lia Capes and Claire Wooley had been about to line up for the Thunder River Rapids when distressed people came rushing out, including a man whose leg was covered in dirt with his clothes scuffed, and a young girl, apparently his daughter, “screaming for her mum”.
“After work we decided to come here for a bit of fun and had only been here for an hour or so before it happened,” Capes said. “We were walking towards the ride because we’d decided we wanted to go on it.
“As soon as we walked towards the line we saw people running out – the lady’s husband running with dirt all down his leg. His daughter was crying so we just tried to comfort her.
“Then the [Dreamworld staff] took her and her little infant sister away.”
Wooley estimated the girl was about six years old: “She told us that it was her family involved, she was screaming for her mum and he [the girl’s father] was just in panic, trying to ring everyone and running back and forth … I assume he was one of the people who had been on the ride. He had scuffs and was covered in dirt like he had fallen.
“She confirmed to us that she was on the ride but I don’t think she was in the raft that had tipped over.”
A former Dreamworld employee who worked at the park for more than a decade said the four who died had been just five seconds from safety. He said the six-seater craft had nearly finished the ride when it hit an empty raft ahead of it and flipped.
Several parkgoers claimed the ride had broken down at least twice earlier in the day and police said those claims would form part of the investigation.
The ride is known as one of the more family-friendly ones, allowing on children as young as two. The circular rafts, which look like six chairs mounted on a giant inner tube, are sent around a 410-metre course. At the end of the ride the rafts are lifted out of the water on an incline by a conveyor belt.
The deaths had an immediate financial impact on the park’s owners, Ardent Leisure. Its shares fell 7.8% on news of the tragedy.
A Queensland Ambulance senior operating officer, Gavin Fuller, said on Tuesday the victims had suffered fatal injuries and could not be revived despite several crews attending the scene.
“One of the rides sustained some sort of malfunction causing two people to be ejected from the ride. Another two were caught inside the ride,” he said.
Thousands of patrons left the park in shock after the tragedy.
A coronial investigation into the cause of the accident and the deaths is under way, with workplace health and safety officers and police forensic crash investigators also involved.
It is Australia’s worst theme park disaster since 1979, when seven people were killed in a fire on the ghost train at Luna Park in Sydney.
Mourners left floral tributes by the park on Wednesday.
Already mourners have left a stream of floral tributes outside Dreamworld this morning following yesterday's tragedy. pic.twitter.com/60XJWPmUHg
— Gold Coast News (@GoldCoastBureau) October 25, 2016
The Gold Coast mayor, Tom Tate, said more counsellors and support staff would be sent to help staff and others deal with the aftermath.
“I mean, they’re used to giving fun and joy to people and all of a sudden, the memories this memory will leave behind is the most horrific,” Tate told Nine News on Wednesday. “We’re going to have to help the family of Dreamworld.”
Tate said the accident had hit a lot of locals and Australians hard: “Australians one way or another have connections to this ride, this theme park and the Gold Coast, and everyone, the community, is feeling it.”
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, released a statement saying he was saddened to hear of the accident. “This is a very, very, sad, tragic event. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who lost their lives.”
Additional reporting by Warren Murray, Calla Wahlquist and Australian Associated Press
