as its legal troubles would suggest, was accused of cutting corners to maximize its profits. For example, it was accused of building rides cheaply, sporadically maintaining many of them, and failing to renovate rides to take advantage of later safety improvements to its ideas made by other facilities. These practices took place in a range of its operations, including customer safety. In the park's last year, it kept part of the ski area open despite being unable to obtain liability insurance. Class Action Park also reported that the park's restaurants often indulged in corner-cutting practices common in that industry, such as steaming hot dog buns stale enough to have hardened and dried so they would moisten and soften enough to appear fresh. Employees The vast majority of workers at Action Park, at least the ones regularly seen by visitors, were teenagers. Jim DeSaye, a security director for the park, said that he got that job at the age of 21, after having worked at the park for two years. His experience was not uncommon. Training sessions were held, but often not taken seriously by staff. In Class Action Park, one former employee recalls that sessions practicing the rescue of drowning victims were often pretexts for hazing. New hires often had to play the drowning victim, and after the training was over, or instead of training, were often abandoned in the water to get out themselves. Most were underaged, undertrained, often under the influence of alcohol, and generally cared little for enforcing park rules and safety requirements. Height- and weight-based restrictions were often ignored. Visitors Since it was closer and slightly cheaper than Six Flags Great Adventure, Action Park attracted many visitors from urban enclaves of the New York metropolitan area. Many of them were often from lower-income neighborhoods where they had few, if any, opportunities to swim, much less learn how. The park greatly overestimated these abilities, and this was a factor in many accidents, as well as the drownings, according to park officials. DeSaye faults management's decision to broaden the customer base by advertising in Spanish-language media as contributing to the accident rate, since few employees spoke Spanish and no written information was made available in that language. The staff's indifference to many of the park's own rules led to a similarly lawless culture among visitors, who generally liked the high level of control they had over their experience;