ABC News Peter Garnish/AAP
Danny Haber describes his family’s experience at Dreamworld theme park 10 years ago as a “sliding doors moment”.
As he and his now wife, Alisha, walked towards the Thunder River Rapids Ride on October 25, 2016, they decided to stop for a drinks break. It put them and their nieces and nephews just out of harm’s way when the horrifying ride malfunction happened.
“We were in the line when out of nowhere there was this loud noise and then screaming. People were running out of the line ahead of us,” Danny, now 44, tells New Idea on the 10 year anniversary of the catastrophe.
Danny says his job in the navy meant he instinctively moved to get involved and, running towards danger, he jumped the barricades where he was met with a scene of disaster.
“A raft was wedged upright and there was a little girl stuck on a gantry,” he says. He found out later she was the daughter of Kate Goodchild, one of the women who died.
Carrying the girl to safety, he returned to the carnage realising there was a man and a woman trapped underwater, as well as a little boy who needed rescuing.
“I got him out of there. He didn’t need to see any more. I got him to focus on me as I carried him out,” Danny says.
Returning to the scene a third time, he and another man started CPR on one victim until the park’s first-aid team took over.
“After that I kind of just walked out. I found my family, someone from Dreamworld took my phone number and it was a very quiet drive home,” Danny says.
It was only watching the news that night he realised the true horror of the event in which four people – Cindy Low, Kate Goodchild, Luke Dorsett and Roozi Araghi – had died. A ride malfunction had caused a raft, full of people, to flip, trapping them underwater.
An inquest later found “systematic failures” in all safety aspects and Ardent Leisure was fined $3.6 million, a sum many families affected believed understated the severity of the event.
“I didn’t sleep that night … I didn’t sleep the next few weeks,” Danny remembers. “I’d had a lot of training in critical incidents, so I had an idea of what would come.”
In the years after the event, sounds and images from that day haunted him. His career had prepared him to a point, but he says it’s still difficult equating a “safe” ride in a fun park with the horror he saw. He has never returned to Dreamworld and says he wouldn’t want to.
At the same time, he’s learnt to focus on the positives.
“We walked away with our lives and the kids were too young to remember it,” he says of his children Nate and Penny, who were one and two at the time. “And my wife has been an amazing support.”
He also says it became the catalyst for change in their lives and he quit his job in Western Australia to move to Queensland to be near their families.
“It made us put family as our number one priority,” he says. “It was a reality check for us and the impact has changed our lives.”
In 2024, Danny was recognised with a bravery award for his actions, something he has mixed feelings about.
“I did what I would hope anyone would’ve done for my family,” he says, adding he doesn’t see himself as a hero.
“On the anniversary every year it’s a day to spend with our kids,” he continues. “We’re so grateful we got to walk away and it’s a reminder every year that, despite the horrors, we got off relatively easily.”
