Disney Announces Chief Safety Officer - Part Two,

Disney Announces Chief Safety Officer - Part Two
Page 1 of 6

by Rebekah Moseley and Benji Breitbart
June 5, 2002
The last part of our coverage of Disney's announement of a Chief Safety Officer for Theme Parks and Resorts.

On Tuesday, June 4th, an event was held at the Disneyland Resort to introduce the new Chief Safety Officer for Disney Theme Parks and Resorts, Greg Hale. In our first article below we had video, pictures and a transcript from Hale's introduction by Disneyland Resort President Cynthia Harriss and the Chairman of Disney Theme Parks and Resorts, Paul Pressler.

This article features the Question and Answer session and the tour of some of the Resort's safety features including a trip underneat California Screamin'.

Video
Four videos of the speeches are available. Each is available in low bandwidth and high bandwidth formats:

Question and Answer Session
Following the introduction there was a Question and Answer session with the media in attendance.

Video: Question and Answer
RealVideo: Low Bandwidth (320 X 240) • High Bandwidth (320 X 240) 


Greg Hale and Paul Pressler

Question regarding the timing of this safety initiative:

Paul Pressler: Well clearly we think that given today’s environment and the heightened awareness around safety, particularly after Spetember 11th, we want to clearly demonstrate to the pulbic and to our guests the importance we place on safety and the safe environment we create here in the park.

So the pieces that we’ve outlined today, we think, are a first step towards doing that. Both our safety report, the announcement of Greg as our Chief Safety Officer and then our driving desire to maintain our leadership role in safety criteria for theme parks by providing new information about the continuous improvement that’s going on throughout the parks.

Question: When there is a safety problem will you have a different approach to the way you deal with the public and the press?

Pressler: I think today illustrates our desire to be a lot more public with the information about what goes into our safety requirements and how we demonstrate the effectiveness of our safety. So, yeah, clearly today we want to educate the public more and more about what we are doing to provide a safe environment to the millions of people that come to our parks.

Question:: What role did the recent high profile accidents play in your decision to unveil this report?

Pressler: Well as I said there’s been clearly been heightened awareness about safety throughout the industry. We think it is very important that we educate the public the steps that we take to provide a safe environment.

Question: In relation to recent lawsuits that have happened at Disney, is this a response to that?

Pressler: Well it’s a continued response that we think is important in today’s environment. We think educating the public, educating our guests who come here, a partnership with our guests on how we can provide a better safe experience and hopefully a fun experience at the same time we think is critically important.

Question: So was any of this due to any lawsuit settlements?

Pressler: No. This was clearly - in today’s environment, we recognize there’s a lot of attention around safety issues. Particularly at theme parks there’re a lot of issues regarding security in the public at large as well as at our theme parks and we felt that it was very important to make public more the information about the criteria that we use and the technology which you are about to see that we use to advance our safety throughout the parks. In the past, of course, we always wanted to preserve the integrity of the magic and the fantasy of our parks but in today’s environment it is critically important that we educate the public more and more about the steps we do take to provide a safe environment.