Memorial Day weekend is the ideal time to pay up for some embarrassing lapse in judgment. After all, no one’s looking.
What better time than Saturday morning, for example, to report federal investigators have charged Walt Disney World with five safety violations at the Primeval Whirl roller coaster? The ride at Animal Kingdom was the site of a fatal employee accident last fall. Mickey must pay $21,500 for being unsafe.
In Nevada, a Northstar Mountain resort developer is facing a record $2.75 million in fines for a series of water quality violations during the construction of the resort’s village in 2006. That news broke yesterday, when no one buys the paper.
Shortly before that, a federal judge ordered Norwegian Cruise Line to pay a $1 million fine for an explosion that killed eight crew members at the Port of Miami in 2003. The Miami-based company has pleaded guilty to gross negligence.
You can almost imagine the discussion between officials and those about to be fined.
Guilty company: “Look, we’ll pay up, but is there any way you could release the news of this really quietly before the holiday weekend?”
Government official: “Oh, sure.”
We’ll never know. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see another set of fines just before the Fourth of July.
