To be fair, those aren't really whispers. Though the official report didn't find that Cedar Fair broke any laws, from my reading the report, one party's actions pretty clearly led to the TTD incident in my opinion. Cedar Fair settled the lawsuit with the victim/her family without a final ruling, but, at least in my opinion, Cedar Fair's maintenance policies led to the ultimate outcome.
Going a little deeper...
If an issue the TTD report found was the result of a broader Cedar Fair maintenance policy and not just an isolated incident, who would really be surprised if a similar core issue as the one that resulted in the TTD accident could be found elsewhere in the chain too? Imagine, hypothetically, how much more damning it would all be if such a policy had, prior to the TTD incident, already been employed on a similar attraction, directly led to another catastrophic, potentially-guest-endangering, ultimately-ride-dooming issue, and the potential issue(s) caused by this theoretical policy—despite being obviously revealed through this hypothetical, prior instance—were never corrected elsewhere. That would be a super, super bad development for Cedar Fair in my estimation. Now imagine for a moment that such information was, theoretically, known within portions of said corporation. One can imagine how desperate said corporation would likely be to keep that story quiet. Unfortunately for Cedar Fair, when you lay off large numbers of people, you tend to spoil a lot of goodwill...
But hey, that's just a theory—a coaster theory—aaannnddd... CUT!
