When a catalogue of mistakes and mismanagement conspire to cause an extraordinary tragedy
What happened?
A couple, aged 31 and 22 years went for a swim in a hotel pool, about 10m by 5m. Neither of the couple could swim.
The pool was an unusual design in that it had a deep middle (rather than end) of 2.1m with abruptly steeply sloping slides with a gradient of 1 in 3.5 (much steeper than the max 1 in 15 recommended in HSG179). There was no poolside supervision. It had CCTV cameras, but these were not supervised by hotel staff and was broken on the day of the incident.
A man, with his wife, sounded the alarm when he discovered the pair in the water, one on the surface and the other underwater. Hotel staff recovered the couple and commenced CPR. They were taken to hospital but were pronounced dead shortly after.
An engineer had been called to fix problems with the CCTV on the morning on the incident – but no temporary measures, such as a lifeguard, were put in place while it was offline.
A former hotel guest told the court how he had warned hotel bosses about the slope in the pool on which he had lost his footing a got into difficulty.
An EHO also revealed she had written to the hotel raising concerns with the supervision arrangements and had planned to visit the hotel just weeks after the incident occurred.
The receptionist working on the front desk at the time of the tragic deaths admitted to failing to sign-in the couple to the pool despite it being part of hotel guidelines. “The only reason I can think is I was busy doing something at the back. I would say that only 40% of guests are signed into the pool,” she said.
Legal Outcome
The hotel group was charged with two counts of a breach of s.3(1) HSWA 1974 and one count of a breach of Regulation 3 MHSWR 1999. They pleaded guilty to all charges.
The hotel group was fined Limited £200,000 plus £30,000 prosecution costs. These had been reduced because the judge was unable to be sure that the hotel’s breaches had directly caused the deaths.
What can we learn from what happened?
A catalogue of mistakes and mismanagement, and once again the key issue was the absence of lifeguard supervision given the design of the pool (deep middle and sharp increase in gradient). This was coupled with a misguided reliance on CCTV, which proved no use whatsoever because it was faulty. The hotel had their chance to deal with the issues, but didn’t. The judge could not be certain how the couple both drowned, but it can be imagined – what was extraordinary was that both the couple tragically died.
The hotel’s profitability fell from just over £500,000 to just under £50,000 as a result of the tragic event, illustrating the business impact poor safety management can have, and the pool has since been removed and replaced by a new spa facility.
Source of Information
QLM Newsletter
Water Incident Research Hub – please note this resource provides significant detail about this and other water related cases.