New IAAPA chair, Greg Hale, has outlined the organisation’s plans for the year ahead, following on from his predecessor with the same key message – that the industry must stand for safety at all times as a top priority.

Hale, who takes over from Universal’s John McReynolds, is also acting chief safety officer for Disney Parks and Resorts. Speaking on his new role with IAAPA, Hale talked about the importance of the organisation’s safety programme, reinforced by its training institutes.

“IAAPA has always had safety as a core value,” he said, speaking to Attractions Management. “It continues to grow its outreach programme to educate about best practices for safety, such as through the IAAPA Safety Institute. In emerging markets, we are reaching out to people before they even open their park to help them learn about and implement the great safety practices that have been developed over the years.”

In the wake of recent theme park tragedies at Dreamworld in Australia and at Alton Towers in the UK, Hale said that safety education and learning from these incidents is crucial to prevent similar circumstances happening again in the future.

“IAAPA doesn’t get directly involved in an accident, that’s down to the authorities in that region,” he said. “Our goal is to put the practices in place to prevent those incidents ever happening. When something bad happens, we try to ensure some good comes of it by learning how to prevent it from happening again somewhere else.

“A single company or industry or city or state might act very rigorously around a particular incident, but that won’t have a widespread effect. IAAPA enables us to create one common pool of learning for members worldwide. If someone is running a park in Vietnam, they are learning from the Dreamworld accident in Australia, or elsewhere, and we’re actually preventing accidents around the world and making the best of a bad situation by preventing accidents in the future.”