The seasonal employees that I’ve talked to, I’ve talked to two, said there was a real division between permanent employees and seasonal employees at that time.
The park itself was closed for two weeks.
You were talking about division between the permanents and the seasonals. There was also an organization down here called, YCC, is that what it was called? I have forgotten, it was too many years back. But it was a youth conservation group. There seemed to be a great division; they seemed to be running off on their own, doing their own thing type of situation. And they were very bitter because the felt that there were signs that this infection, or whatever it was, had broken out earlier than anybody had taken any action on it. And this may or may not well be, I don’t know.
There was some feeling that the concessionary was actively covering it up.
That was certainly the case, yes. Because he did not want to lose his business. And of course he did lose business. And, besides, he lost a lot of money. But no, he didn’t want to close up, and obviously he didn’t want to admit any fault in the fact that he kept open when he thought there was something wrong. Because there had been reports, I mean, things keep coming back to me now that I talk about them, but there had been reports several days ahead when people really got sick, that “Hey, something is wrong here, we got poisoned up there.” This sort of thing. And we had people that said they were being forced to work and they were throwing up and diarrhea and the whole bit, and were still being forced to work, I mean, in the kitchen type situation. It was pretty sad situation. And it was pretty well documented that this was exactly what was happening, too. The regional director and I came here and we saw that things were in a pretty sorry mess and we ordered our chief engineer and our landscape people down here to start working on something to take care of the water situation immediately. I stayed here about two weeks that time, and then we had a hearing on it later on and some of it was too bad because Dick Sims who was the superintendent at the time was being blamed for virtually everything that went on. Dick may have very well been partially at fault, but he wasn’t solely at fault. And he was sick, too. It wasn’t easy to make command decisions. I never had what they had, but I guess it affected some people so they just didn’t care whether they lived or died.
Jean: Well, it took a while to identify the problem in the firs place.
It did. There was still snow on the ground up there, where the overflow was.
