It’s far from uncommon for construction, or deconstruction, to be happening inside a theme park like Disneyland. I don’t remember the last time I was in any theme park and didn’t see construction barriers up for one reason or another. Right now, you'll find Splash Mountain undergoing a major transformation, and the Adventureland Treehouse only just reopened after a several-month closure. One of the side effects of parks continuously evolving is that work is always happening. But some of the work you may have seen at Disneyland in the last few days is a little bit different.
If you’ve seen work being done on light posts and other fixtures around the park, that’s due to an incident that took place last week in which a lamppost was blown over in high winds, resulting in three park guests being injured. As a result, crews have been out doing work on similar lampposts, with The Blast reporting that at least one similar to the one that fell has been removed and other lights have been removed from posts.
It’s believed that high winds combined with what was likely an old lamppost contributed to the incident, which saw one person removed to a local hospital to be treated for injuries, while two others were treated on the scene. Since it’s not hard to imagine that multiple lampposts were in a similar state to the one that fell, it’s not surprising to see others removed if only as a precaution.
When Disneyland’s Fantasmic dragon burned up earlier this year, any other theme parks that were using similar fire effects were also put on hold. It’s standard practice when Disney Parks finds one problem to clamp down on everything that is similar and review it to make sure it’s up to standards. We can bet every lamppost in every Disney Park is probably on the list to be reviewed right now.
While the accident was unfortunate, it’s maybe not that surprising to see something like this happen considering that Disneyland is almost 70 years old. While I doubt the lamppost in question is original to the park, it’s likely pretty old, and thus it’s going to find itself in need of repair or replacement eventually. While Disneyland certainly does regular maintenance, it’s likely there wasn’t an expectation that the lamppost was a problem... until it was.
This is one of those times when construction walls are a good thing. While they can be eyesores and usually mean attractions are closed, we’d all certainly prefer that any potentially dangerous spots in the park get fixed up. And who knows, maybe we could see even bigger changes. Maybe there’s some new lighting technology that Disney will start to roll out as a result of needing to replace a few lampposts.
