It was rather uncommon for coasters prior to 2005 to have minimum down restraints that prevented a dispatch if restraints are up.
Clearly, Apollo was one of them, having been installed with the ride in '99. Alpie was fitted with them sometime, I think 2010, but I could be wrong. Either way, has them now. LNM still doesn't to my knowledge.
The more I think on this incident, the more I realize that it is quite possible it happened. Now I doubt that this guy will get very much, in the words of Jeremy Jam, "I'm not, not going to get nothing," since he is trying to prove potential injury. By that logic, I would sue every driver that cut me off in Chicago claiming that I could have died. Anyways, things like this very much do happen (I can point to a specific example with MT and a team member, but that's a story for another time), where safety systems are not idiot proof. In safety system design, not only do you have to make it idiot proof, but also litigation proof. The only way that someone can get injured is when they themselves defeat the safety system. For example, there is a small press on an assembly line. In order to avoid workers from being able to crush their fingers under the press, there are light curtains, a two-hand start (two finger presences, spaced apart to require the operator to have both hands on it to start the press), and an e-stop. If a worker was somehow able to rewire one of those safety features, someone could get hurt, but because it was not designed that way, the engineers responsible for that press are not liable, rather the person (or company) that rewired it would be. If the design was flawed from the beginning, say the light curtain was not wired correctly in the prints, nor tested correctly for function, the design staff would be liable. In the case of Hershey, whoever made the design choice to not include harness prox switches, which was probably the HP design staff, would be at least partially liable if an incident occurred, being only shielded by the SOP which was not followed. These cases usually don't just fall on one individual, in this case, the ride operators and will probably stay more after the park, who made a choice that was not necessarily following the state of the art safety practices of early 2000's ride design.
Having been a ride operator, I can say that if the events occurred exactly as the articles are reporting, this is really bad for the staff at the ride. I mean, really?! How do you miss a harness sticking up in the air on a ride where nothing is obstructing the view of the operators? I will be interested in what HP presents in defense of this as this just seems too illogical to have happened this way.
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