Yesterday, the Mossos d'Esquadra and the Civil Protection technicians continued to analyze the circumstances of the accident at the Tomahawk in Port Aventura. The police have opened proceedings and when the agents conclude the inspections, the report will be sent to the judge. Then the competent court will decide whether to open an investigation or close the case.
He also has Civil Protection work, which depends on the Department of the Interior. Technicians are “checking” whether Port Aventura correctly applied its self-protection plan when the accident occurred with 14 roller coaster passengers injured. The plan is correctly approved by the Generalitat and is in the review phase, since the current one expired in September 2023. It is nothing exceptional, although “it is not optimal,” they add from Civil Protection.
Twelve of the fourteen injured have already been discharged. Two of the passengers remain in critical condition, hospitalized in Bellvitge and the Joan XXIII in Tarragona with a reserved prognosis.
The fall of a tree on Sunday morning, around 11:30 a.m., on the attraction tracks caused the accident. The tree did not completely collapse onto the roller coaster's rails, but it leaned enough for the branches to hit some of the passengers.
There are several questions that the police investigation will have to resolve, especially. Agents and technicians are trying to take a minute of the accident to determine when the tree fell and whether the roller coaster train had already started its journey.
One of the witnesses explained anonymously in the Diari de Tarragona that the passengers saw the tree lying on the attraction and did everything possible to bend down and avoid the impact of the branches.
Port Aventura sources explain instead that the tree fell just before the train passed, making it impossible to avoid the collision. According to initial investigations, none of the Tomahawk employees had noticed the tree fall until the impact occurred.
Knowing when the tree fell will be one of the keys to reconstructing the accident. Not the only transcendent element. It will be essential to determine if it was only the wind that caused the tree to fall, as Port Aventura maintains. The wind gusts during the hours before the accident reached 71 kilometers per hour in Vila-seca, with an average of 45 km/h. It is not an exceptional wind in the area, far from it.
Port Aventura is used to operating with wind, with an internal protocol that orders the closure of higher altitude attractions, such as Shambala, Dragon Khan or Red Force, as a precaution. This is not the case with the low-altitude Tomahawk.
The park has stressed from the beginning that the accident was caused by a factor external to the attraction, the tree felled by the wind, and not by the operation of the roller coaster, which did not derail and completed its journey.
Another factor is the location of the tree, near the attraction, and its condition. The park's gardening teams took advantage of the 32-day break, after Three Kings and until the reopening last Friday, to carry out major pruning and work with heavy machinery. Routine maintenance work includes the removal of trees in poor condition or that are considered to pose a danger to the attractions.
