Current Issue of Safeguard

Safeguard magazine is published six times a year and explores all aspects of workplace health and safety in New Zealand.

The magazine contains feature stories exploring emerging issues in health and safety, as well as profiles of organisations with progressive policies and of health and safety practitioners.

Safeguard features regular commentary from people working in health & safety, as well as reviews of books, videos and software.

The magazine lists details of all successful prosecutions undertaken under the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992.

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Issue 118 Nov/Dec 2009

Here's a sample of what's in this issue:

Feature stories - Brief items - Prosecutions - Editorial

Feature stories

Ready to work
Isaac Fruean may have lost his arm in a workplace accident but the one-time Samoan wrestling champion is determined to come out on top, Angela Gregory discovers.

Promising results
The well received Puataunofo project in Manukau looks likely to continue, reports Angela Gregory.

Drug and alcohol workplace challenges
Matthew Beattie sets out strategies on how to keep workplaces clean.

Off work can be bad medicine
A successful pilot programme in Taupo is about to be launched further afield to help injured workers remain at work or return more quickly, says ACC.

Machine head
Jackie Brown-Haysom talks to engineer Nick Frame about the challenges of effective machine guarding.

Pedal to the metal
John Skudder reviews the state of safety in the metal manufacturing sector, and presents industry guidelines which have been developed into e-learning modules.

Testing their mettle
Peter Bateman looks at a collaborative project which takes the ‘modern regulator’ approach to help metal manufacturing businesses comply with health and safety laws.

Putting the heat on plastics
Fritz Drissner introduces a new EPMU booklet on chemicals of concern for the plastics manufacturing industry.

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Brief Items

Rehabilitation: don’t wait on the courts
Court-ordered reparations are all very well, argues Grant Nicholson, but employers should do all they can to help rehabilitate their injured staff anyway.

Incident Investigation
ATV fall.

Competent, or suitably qualified
Neville Rockhouse reports on his recent attendance at the 2009 INSHPO annual business meeting in Calgary, Canada.

A changing environment
Marlene Thomson says the professional development of OHNs has to keep up with modern practices.

Hi-Viz
Karen Smith, Carter Holt Harvey, Nelson.

The approach to enforcement
Michael Hargreaves sketches out some shades of grey in the DoL’s attitude to enforcement.

Gone bush
Angela Gregory discovers how a lone council worker can how head for the hills with confidence, at the push of a button.

Osteoporosis – silent killer
Maintaining calcium intake is critical for healthy bones, says Kaylene Dowers.

Work death toll for the year starting July 2009: 25
We list details of the most recent work fatalities investigated by DOL.

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Prosecutions

Company roped in
Senior managers quickly changed their minds as to their company’s guilt in an accident where a worker’s leg was crushed by a logging truck after hearing evidence that a site manager had ignored workplace risks. This was revealed in the recently released sentencing notes of Judge Stan Thorburn in the case of Owens Cargo Co Ltd, which had been charged under ss6 and 49 of the HSE Act. The company was fined $150,000 and ordered to pay reparations of $22,000, in addition to $28,000 already paid (Wellington DC, May 9 2008).

Irish bar fined
A popular bar at Auckland’s Viaduct Basin has had to pay close to $100,000 after a patron was left with brain injuries after a fall. Danny Doolans Ltd was fined $40,000 and ordered to pay reparations of $47,500 after pleading guilty to breaching s16 of the HSE Act (Auckland DC, January 29 2009).

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Editorial — Home safe

As this last Safeguard for 2009 lands in postal boxes around the country it will be December. After the usual scramble of work functions and manic socialising as people dust off their barbecues, many are probably only just hanging on for their annual Christmas/New Year holidays.

I know I was just hanging on last year, but with the added bonus of ending an 11-year stint with the NZ Herald for an extended summer of under-employment and unknown career pastures. In the short term however I was heading for what was to be a month on the Argentinian pampas, after escorting to Buenos Aires a teenage daughter who had scored herself a place on an international student trip to Antarctica.

As fate would have it her ship, on an earlier run, got stuck on rocks. To cut a long story short, mother and daughter found themselves embarking on a three-month unplanned tour of South America until she could instead be placed on a February sailing. With barely ten words of Spanish between us we intrepidly set off, fumbling our way around Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.

You could say I was safety-ignorant in ways that after some months in this job I could never be again. At the time my daughter and I laughed, occasionally nervously, at the lack of caution shown. Not least was the insane speeding of cars, buses, and taxis in South America and the commensurate lack of seatbelts.

When visiting boiling hot geysers in northern Chile we were amazed how tourists would stand right on the edge of them, some even lowering their bottoms over the spouts to warm their backsides in sub-zero temperatures as friends took photos. In New Zealand such hazards would be well fenced off, and any foolhardy behaviour downright discouraged.

Earlier this year we were telling a young man about the trip and counted off easily half a dozen close calls where our safety was jeopardised. The most graphic example would be the moment the Bolivian driver of a rusty old jeep careered off a mountain-pass road, and had us hurtling in weaving movements directly towards a large rock.

It was about 3am, and he had been distracted by a spectacular electrical storm. I thought about the recently filled petrol containers strapped to the roof of the vehicle and with the fellow passengers – a Swiss architect, German doctor and Brazilian lawyer – let out a chorus of multi-cultural expletives while the driver muttered something in Spanish.

My daughter, blissfully asleep, woke to the sudden halt (short of the rock) and blearily accused us all of over-reacting. Over breakfast the next morning the Brazilian translated for me what the driver had said: “Welcome to hell”. Fortunately our driver had replaced the jeep’s completely bald tyres with new treads the day before or I suspect I’d not be writing this now. I later read that a good rule of thumb for travelling in Bolivia is if the locals are scared, you should be too.

Local tour companies run these lucrative trips across the Bolivian salt plains virtually all year round. The coca leaf-chewing drivers barely sleep between jobs as they relentlessly ferry the tourists back and forth across Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, and through the Bolivian highlands. There had been a shocking accident just a year before when five Israeli and six Japanese tourists were killed after the driver of one jeep fell asleep and collided with another jeep. Just a few months later a small bus carrying eight foreign tourists flipped on the salt flat, killing the driver and three of the passengers. It places questions over New Zealand’s apparently sub-standard adventure tourism safety regulations in a different context for me.

So this is a long-winded way of saying “safe holidays”, and for those for whom overseas trips are an unaffordable luxury in these economically-straightened times – you may be safer for it.

Angela Gregory
Editor

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