Makes no sense to me, does it to you?

Four safety violations by a Massey Energy subsidiary led to the December death of a miner who fell from an elevated conveyor belt at an eastern Kanawha County strip mine, state regulators said Tuesday.

The state Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training cited Massey's Spartan Mining for violations inspectors said contributed to miner David Neal's fatal fall.

Neal, 57, of Dixie, was lying on the belt replacing rollers when the belt started unexpectedly, according to a state agency report issued Tuesday. Neal fell nearly 40 feet onto a frozen coal pile below. He died 10 days after the Dec. 4 accident at Spartan's Mammoth Mine in Hughes Creek.

Spartan did not provide adequate fall protection - such as a safety belt or lanyard - or equip the belt with a sufficient alarm to warn when the belt was getting ready to start, the state report said.

Neither Neal, a fireboss, nor a miner trainee who was working with him shut off power to the conveyor belt, as is required before beginning maintenance work. But, investigators found, the switch to shut off the power was broken.

Investigators could not determine how the conveyor belt started running in the first place.

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/Business/200803180602

Lets see now, ......

No one shut the power off to the conveyor belt. Then it should have been running.

The switch to shut off the power was broken. Was it broken in the "ON" or "OFF" position?

Neal was lying on the belt replacing rollers. Then it must not have been running.

The belt started unexpectedly. Did it then stop unexpectedly also?

Neal fell nearly 40 feet off the end of the conveyor onto a frozen coal pile below. The coal pile is at the end of the conveyor, right.

Investigators couldn't determine how the conveyor belt started running in the first place. Well then, maybe it never started running.

Well "DUH", maybe Neal wasn't laying on the conveyor, ........... maybe he was standing out on the end of the conveyor and either slipped, jumped or was pushed off the end of it.

.

MSHA can say what they want. LOTO and fall protection would have prevented this tradegdy. If the employeer refused to provide both, the employee should have walked away.

Aaron wrote:MSHA can say what they want. LOTO and fall protection would have prevented this tradegdy. If the employeer refused to provide both, the employee should have walked away.

That's easy for you to say when you don't have that employee's family to house, feed, clothe, send to school, etc.

We all make judgemnets every day about trading safety and security for something we want. When a worker at Massey or anywhere else does not have a strong union to back them up, simply walking away in not a realistic option. They've got to play the odds of injury against that paycheck.

Non-union workplaces should be no less safe than union workplaces. But too often they are.

ziggy wrote:

Aaron wrote:MSHA can say what they want. LOTO and fall protection would have prevented this tradegdy. If the employeer refused to provide both, the employee should have walked away.

That's easy for you to say when you don't have that employee's family to house, feed, clothe, send to school, etc.

We all make judgemnets every day about trading safety and security for something we want. When a worker at Massey or anywhere else does not have a strong union to back them up, simply walking away in not a realistic option. They've got to play the odds of injury against that paycheck.

Non-union workplaces should be no less safe than union workplaces. But too often they are.

That's the biggest bunch of horse $hit I've seen you post and you've certainly posted a great deal of it.

So you disagree that non-union workplaces should be just as safe as union work places? Why should non-union workers be expected to work in a less safe environment than a union worker?

Sorry, I had to run to work.

What I'm saying is that you have no evidence unless it is some union backed tripe that shows union work places are more safe then non-union work places. In fact, I believe it's the exact opposite.

We have 21 plants, 5 of which are union affiliated. Those 5 rank 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 in both RIR and DAC's with the 3rd ranked plant narrowly defeating the union vote by less then 10% 3 times in the last 5 years. All 6 of those plants are in liberal/union cities and states. The reason they rank where they do is all have union contracts that handcuff management when it comes to disciplining for any reason, including safety violations.

Our parent company instituted a zero tolerance LOTO violation policy a couple of years ago. The unions immediately sued and got a stay from a liberal judge on firing first time LOTO offenders. The liberal judge then found for the unions saying the zero tolerance violated the union contract. It has since been appealed.

The bottom line is, as tragic as this incident was, had the victim used personal responsible and judgement, he would be alive today. It's that simple. If you know anything about LOTO, you know that.

Aaron wrote:The bottom line is, as tragic as this incident was, had the victim used personal responsible and judgement, he would be alive today. It's that simple. If you know anything about LOTO, you know that.

Can you tell us what RIR and DAC's and LOTO are, or are those acronyms for some words too big for you to remember and spell out? Or, more likely, does it help you to feel superior to the rest of us to use acronyms that you know well that most of us will not recognize?

ziggy wrote:

Aaron wrote:The bottom line is, as tragic as this incident was, had the victim used personal responsible and judgement, he would be alive today. It's that simple. If you know anything about LOTO, you know that.

Can you tell us what RIR and DAC's and LOTO are, or are those acronyms for some words too big for you to remember and spell out? Or, more likely, does it help you to feel superior to the rest of us to use acronyms that you know well that most of us will not recognize?

I'm still waiting on your documentation for your claims about union facilities, by the way. You implied you had a clue about safety when you made your horse $hit claim. If you KNOW that a union facility is safer then a non-union one is, I would think you would know basic safety acronyms are. I guess you've shown you don't know what you're talking about after all.

Here's the answers to your questions.

RIR-Recordable Incident Rate. Number of incidents times 200,000 divided by number of man hours worked.

DAC-Days Away Cases. Total number of days missed by all employees injured within a company.

LOTO (which would have saved this man's life) is Lockout/Tagout which means shutting down the energy source to a piece of equipment or machinery. OSHA (I imagine MSHA does as well) mandates that every employee is trained on Lockout/Tagout every year whether they're authorized (this man would have been as he was doing maintenance on a conveyor), affected (anyone that works directly with equipment but is not authorized to perform LOTO) or other which is people who work at the location but are not authorized to perform LOTO or works directly with machinery or equipment that is locked out.

OSHA (MSAH as well, I would imagine) also mandates that each authorized employee be trained hands on to perform LOTO and that each piece of machinery has a machine specific LOTO procedure that is tested at the bare mininum, once a year.

Had this man performed LOTO, he would have shut the electricity to the conveyor off, placed a one key only lock assigned to him on the energy isolating device (probably a knife switch breaker), and placed the key in his pocket so no one else could start the machine. He would be alive today.

Seems to me though Zig, that a business owner required by law to post an OSHA log every year for 20+ years listing all OSHA recordable incidents, accidents and lost days would know what a RIR and a DAC is though. So what gives?

Aaron wrote:I'm still waiting on your documentation for your claims about union facilities, by the way.

What I claimed was that "Non-union workplaces should be no less safe than union workplaces. But too often they are."

The Massey mine fatality at issue here was at a non-union mine, not at an Arch Coal union mine, for exqample. So this one instance in which the non-union mine workplace being unsafe was once too often.

RIR-Recordable Incident Rate. Number of incidents times 200,000 divided by number of man hours worked.

DAC-Days Away Cases. Total number of days missed by all employees injured within a company.

LOTO (which would have saved this man's life) is Lockout/Tagout which means shutting down the energy source to a piece of equipment or machinery. OSHA (I imagine MSHA does as well) mandates that every employee is trained on Lockout/Tagout every year whether they're authorized (this man would have been as he was doing maintenance on a conveyor), affected (anyone that works directly with equipment but is not authorized to perform LOTO) or other which is people who work at the location but are not authorized to perform LOTO or works directly with machinery or equipment that is locked out.

OSHA (MSAH as well, I would imagine) also mandates that each authorized employee be trained hands on to perform LOTO and that each piece of machinery has a machine specific LOTO procedure that is tested at the bare mininum, once a year.

Had this man performed LOTO, he would have shut the electricity to the conveyor off, placed a one key only lock assigned to him on the energy isolating device (probably a knife switch breaker), and placed the key in his pocket so no one else could start the machine. He would be alive today

Thank you. This makes your post at least understandable now.

ziggy wrote:

Aaron wrote:I'm still waiting on your documentation for your claims about union facilities, by the way.

What I claimed was that "Non-union workplaces should be no less safe than union workplaces. But too often they are."

And what I said was often times union work places are less safe because management is handcuffed in handing out discipline by grievance procedures and contracts, at least that's been my personal experience.

You're making a claim that you can't back up unless of course you can show that there was never a fatality at a union facility. So can you do that? Or are you merely expressing your biased personal opinion and trying to pass it off as fact?

Well, it seems that neither of you addressed these two issues, to wit:

The belt started unexpectedly. Did it then stop unexpectedly also?

Investigators couldn't determine how the conveyor belt started running in the first place. Well then, maybe it never started running.

Now why was that?

Do you both believe in supernatural or magical "happenings" ......... or what?

"DUH", I sure as hell don't, ...... no matter whether it is a union or non-union work site.

And that is the reason I posed this statement, to wit:

SamCogar wrote:Well "DUH", maybe Neal wasn't laying on the conveyor, ........... maybe he was standing out on the end of the conveyor and either slipped, jumped or was pushed off the end of it.

Maybe you two should be asking yourselves why they did not cite any "eyewitness" accounts of the accident.

Seems to me there should have been another employee close by enough to "hear something" or "see something" when the accident occured.

Like maybe seeing or hearing the belt starting up and then stopping, ....... or hearing the victim screaming, hollowing ........ or seeing him falling off the end to his death.

.

Machines will start up. Granted it's very rare but it does happen. But more then likely, if it did start up, someone pushed a button.

But even if that wasn't the case, the belt didn't start and the employee fell or was pushed as you suggested, the conveyor was elevated over 4 feet, requiring fall protection. If the employee had been wearing a harness and laynard secured to a fixed point as safety regulations require, he'd still be alive.