Disney resort custodian says he warned managers they should have fences

[pnwmom]

88. The Polynesian is lucky it didn't have its own event in April.

And there have been other alligator sightings at the Grand Floridian.

We can only wonder how many near misses there have been.

http://www.torontosun.com/2016/06/15/canadian-family-also-recently-ran-from-alligator-in-same-lagoon

The frightening episode happened in April.

A British family told the U.K. Mirror they were sitting on the beach of the Polynesian Village Resort, on the Seven Seas Lagoon, with their two young children when the gator clamoured out of the water and onto the sand.

Though the younger daughter of Carl and Karen Davis said she thought she heard something in the water earlier, it was the Canadian family sitting nearby who saw the creature first and ran.

"We sat there for a while longer and dismissed (our daughter's) concern," Carl recalled in the Mirror. "The next thing, the Canadian family sitting a little way up ran over and shouted, 'Alligator!'

"It was directly in front of us, around 40 feet away. It lurched out of the water and we had to run. It was pitch black with no lighting on the actual beach section ... Our daughter was screaming, she was petrified."

And "officials" now say the family wasn't wading in the water -- they were sitting on the shore.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-disney-alligator-history-20160615-story.html

Grand Floridian custodian Mike Hamilton was so concerned by alligators occasionally swimming up close to the shore of Walt Disney World's Seven Seas Lagoon, he said he warned managers they should fence off the area.

"There are signs that say, 'No swimming,' but no signs that say gators and everything else in this lake," he said.

SNIP

San Diego attorney David Hiden told the Orlando Sentinel on Wednesday that last year he whisked his son to safety at Disney's Coronado Springs after a gator approached the boy playing in calf-deep water. Then Hiden saw a second gator nearby. Hiden said a hotel manager called one of them a "resident pet" and seemed unconcerned.

SNIP

Alfred Smith of Charleston, S.C., said he alerted a Grand Floridian employee Tuesday night after seeing a gator in the lagoon. He thinks it's the same one that attacked the boy less an hour later.

"I did warn another family of three that had small kids too close to the water and they along with another family took their children and left," Smith said via email.