Thursday, November 10, 2011

Pike River mine CEO charged with 11 alleged offences over fatal mine disaster...




Quantcast

 

Pike River mine CEO, Peter Whittle, charged with 11 alleged offences concerning last year's mine disaster near Greymouth on New Zealand's West Coast, that killed 29 mine workers.
5951957
JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/The Press, Christchurch
CHARGED: Peter Whittall, Pike River's chief executive at the time of the explosions.
LATEST: Lawyers for former Pike River boss Peter Whittall have confirmed he is among those being charged by the Department of Labour in the wake of the tragic explosion at the West Coast mine a year ago.
Whittall was Pike River Coal chief executive, which is now in receivership, at the time of the explosion, which killed 29 men.
The Pike River receivers confirmed that a number of charges have been laid against the company by the department. The 25 charges, against Whittall, Pike River Coal and VLI Drilling, were served yesterday.
The receivers today asked the District Court to lift the existing suppression orders which had been previously sought by the department.
"The matter is now sub judice and the receivers will not be making any further comment at this time."
Whittall's lawyers said he had never sought suppression and denied the all charges against him. They alleged he failed to comply with the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992.
"Rather he has been actively seeking to have that order obtained by the Department of Labour lifted as soon as possible so that he could be identified publicly," they said.
"Mr Whittall is a coal miner. He comes from a coal mining town and has worked in underground mines all his life. He maintains that he would never do anything to put men who worked with him at risk. And Mr Whittall will fight being scape goated now."
The charges alleged Whittall failed to take all practicable steps to ensure the safety of workers at the mine, the lawyers said.
Charges related to operations at the mine at a time when Whittall was based in Wellington and handling corporate - not operational - matters, the lawyers said.
An Australian, Whittall had remained on in large part to assist with the department investigation, when he could have taken voluntary redundancy, or left the company and New Zealand.
"He is deeply saddened by the Department of Labour's actions and intends to vigorously defend all charges laid against him," the lawyers said of the man who was the public face of the tragedy, and whose actions in the weeks after the explosion elicited public sympathy.
"Mr Whittall took on this role because he believed it was the right thing to do, and he continued to front for Pike even though it greatly raised his profile at a time when criminal investigations were under way," the lawyers said.
pikerivermine600
He had been "fully co-operative" throughout the year-long investigation, and would like to comment further "but in the circumstances has been advised not to make any public statements, given that the matter comes within the jurisdiction of the district court".
The department confirmed all suppression orders had been lifted, following a teleconference between all parties late this afternoon convened by the Greymouth District Court.
It said Pike River Coal had been charged with four offences of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure employee safety; five of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure the safety of its contractors, subcontractors and their employees; and one of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure that no action or inaction of its employees harmed another person.
It said these charges related to, among other things, methane explosion and ventilation management, to lower the risk and impact of an explosion.
VLI Drilling Pty (Valley Longwall) has been charged with one offence of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure employee safety; one of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure the safety of contractors, subcontractors and their employees; and one of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure that no action or inaction of its employees harmed another person.
Those failures related to the maintenance and operation of machinery.
Whittall was charged with four offences of acquiescing or participating in the failures of Pike River Coal Limited as an employer; four of acquiescing or participating in the failures of Pike River Coal as a principal; and four offences of failing to take all practicable steps to ensure that no action or inaction of his as an employee harmed another person.
The department's investigation took 357 days to complete and was the most complex in its history, the department said.
At its peak, a team of 15 was directly involved in the investigation and more than 200 interviews were conducted.

http://anzacbloggersunite.blog.co.uk

Enhanced by Zemanta

Sunday, November 06, 2011

Time for change? GMT could be relegated to history...

GreenwichImage by Márcio Cabral de Moura via Flickr

  • Quantcast

     

    :no:Time for change? GMT could be relegated to history
    300px-BigBenAtDusk
    Leading scientists from around the world are meeting in Britain to consider a proposal that could eventually see Greenwich Mean Time relegated to a footnote in history.

  • For more than 120 years, GMT has been the international standard for timekeeping, but it is now under threat from a new definition of time itself based not on the rotation of the Earth, but on atomic clocks.

  • In January 2012, the International Telecommunication Union will meet in Geneva to vote on whether to adopt the new measure, despite protests from Britain.

  • The two-day meeting of about 50 experts at a country house northwest of London, under the aegis of the prestigious Royal Society, on Thursday and Friday will look at some of the issues involved.

  • Predictably the question has hurt Britain's national pride - particularly when British believe their old rivals France are leading the push to change away from GMT to the new time standard.

  • "We understand that in Britain they have a sense of loss for GMT," said Elisa Felicitas Arias, director of the time department at the France-based International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which pushed for the change.

  • GMT is based on the passage of the sun over the zero meridian line at the Greenwich Observatory in southeast London, and became the world standard for time at a conference in Washington in the United States in 1884.

  • France had lobbied for "Paris Mean Time" at the same conference.

  • In 1972 it was replaced in name by Universal Co-ordinated Time (UTC) but that essentially remained the same as GMT.

  • UTC is based on about 400 atomic clocks at laboratories around the world but then corrected with "leap seconds" to align itself with the Earth's rotational speed, which fluctuates.

  • But the tiny variations between Earth speed and atomic speed have become a problem for GPS, the global positioning systems and mobile phone networks on which the modern world relies.

  • "These networks need to be synchronised to the millisecond," Arias said.

  • "We are starting to have parallel definitions of time. Imagine a world where there were two or three definitions of a kilogram.
  • "
    The meeting in London will look at the implications of abolishing the leap seconds and moving fully to atomic time.

  • That would see atomic time slowly diverge from GMT, by about one minute every 60 to 90 years, or by an hour every 600 years, and there would need to be "leap minutes" a couple of times a century to bring the two in line.

  • The proposal would then formally be voted on in Geneva.

  • The potential loss of GMT has prompted soul searching in the British press, particularly at a time when the country is itself considering switching to British Summer Time, one hour ahead of GMT, on a permanent basis.

  • The Sunday Times said GMT had "symbolised Britain's role as a Victorian superpower" but that "just as that role has inexorably diminished, so GMT itself could in effect disappear."

  • British science minister David Willetts has opposed the plan, saying it has become more than just a scientific row.

  • "This is primarily a finely balanced scientific argument but I do detect undercurrents of nationalism," he said.

  • "Britain's position is that we should stick to real time as experienced by humans, which is based on the Earth's rotation, not atomic clocks.

  • "Without leap seconds we will lose contact with the reality of Earth's rotation. Eventually our midnight would happen at noon."

  • China meanwhile is said to oppose the change on the grounds that its astronomers want to retain Earth-rotation based time.

  • -Acknowledgements: AAP

  • NZCity, NewsTalkZB
  • http://huttriver.blog.co.uk
  • http://www.phoneservice.org/blog/2011/10-great-reasons-to-consider-prepaid-cellular-service/#comment-2492
Enhanced by Zemanta