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$600k Fine Over Data Center Death (datacenterdynamics.com)
judgecorp writes: UK contractors Balfour Beatty and Norland have been fined £380,000 ($580k) after an electrician was electrocuted while working on a data center owned by finance firm Morgan Stanley. The fine follows mounting concern that safety is being compromised because of the need for data centers to remain online non-stop. This leads to pressure for contractors to work on live power supplies.
From reading TFA it seems he didn't know it was live because there were 2 companies at work without any single person being responsible for coordination.
The 600k was the fine for non-compliance. You'd get that whether or not someone was killed. (some fines will get a bumper for injury, but not many have a bump for death for some reason)
Ret assured, there will be a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed by the family that will get settled out of court for an "undisclosed amount". (around 4 million is par) The fine was just the wakeup-call for the board to find a scapegoat to be the focus of the PR crucification and actual painful monetary loss for the impending lawsuit. The way things like this usually go, if the press doesn't dig up any real pattern of misconduct, there will probably just be someone issuing a public apology. If they do find a pattern, someone will get the axe.
Unfortunately, these places rarely get a fine unless someone is injured or killed, because nobody knows or cares about the noncomp until it hits the papers. Then the regs look bad if they don't step in and issue a fine like they ought to have done several times in the past to have, y'know, prevented this from happening in the first place.
But regardless of what happens, hopefully there will be changes made. From the looks of it, the tech that got killed was unaware that the wire that got him was energized, due to poor communication from his management, which appears to have been the result of poor communication from upper management and whoever was coordinating the work with the other group that was in charge of the deadly wire. So it's a bit early to be blaming the tech. Heck, he may have opened the box and tested it and found it wasn't connected yet and was safe to leave open, got to work, connecting it to something else, and half an hour later someone in another building lit the box up and the tech never knew what hit him. Things like that can happen when two different groups are working on connected systems and are unaware of each other and not keeping in communication as shared circuits are cut and energized.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"Ret assured, there will be a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed by the family that will get settled out of court for an "undisclosed amount". (around 4 million is par)"
Very unlikely, it was in the UK, we don;t get settlements anywhere near that level
It happened in the United Kingdom and live line working is perfectly legal. If you read the article you will see the death occurred due to a lack of communication causing the people to be unaware they where working in the vicinity of line equipment.
Here is a link to the Health and Safety Executive's press release on the subject which has more details. The full judgement does not seem to have hit the judiciary web side yet. At least my searches are coming up blank.
http://press.hse.gov.uk/2015/e...
Basically the fines where from not operating proper health and safety systems. If someone has enough patience you should be able to dig out the full judgement from the
This is why (at least in the US), standard (and required) practice is to place a lock on the source of energy, and retain the only key to said lock. If multiple workers are all working on the same circuit, each worker has his (or her) own lock on the circuit.
It's called lockout/tagout, and there are SEVERE fines for removing somebody else's lock (and if somebody gets killed, due to your removing his lock, that would be considered manslaughter)
That's the kind of stop lock-out-tag-out is supposed to prevent.
I question how it was possible for someone to accidentally re-energize something.
Except that I am sure that MS is not on the hook for this at all.
That's WHY they use contractors.
Same thing with cell tower owners like Verizon... they own the them but they contract out all the work on them and are not liable for any accidents...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.