
Not even the best surgeons in the land would have been able to save those injured in Dreamworld’s 2016 Thunder River Rapids ride tragedy.
The former first aid manager of the Gold Coast theme park has told an inquest into the deaths of four visitors at the park that nothing could be done to save their lives.
Cindy Low, Kate Goodchild, her brother Luke Dorsett and his partner Roozi Araghi all died when the 30-year-old ride malfunctioned, causing their raft to collide with another raft before flipping on its side.
Ex-first aid manager and qualified paramedic Shane Green was among the first to arrive on the scene but told the inquest in Southport his staff were essentially confronted by a hopeless scene.
“In all honesty, if we’d have had the world’s leading cardio-thoracic surgeons, neurosurgeons and trauma surgeons in the park with all their equipment, nothing would have changed the outcome,” he said on Wednesday.
Mr Green said safety staff at the park had never contemplated such a situation.
“We’d do a lot of training, different things – cardiac arrest training – but we’d never trained, or even thought about anything like that,” he said.
Mr Green conceded the scene had appeared “chaotic and out of control” due to the overwhelming nature of the tragedy.
Both Mr Green and another of the park’s former safety officers, paramedic John Clark, told the inquest they were only initially aware of three victims.
As Mr Clark attempted resuscitation on one person he’d dragged from a water-filled trench, he became aware of a fourth person in the trench as the water receded.