Slashdot Mirror
$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.
How about a mandatory downtime for the data centre of say, 24 hours?
Hit 'em in the hip pocket - which is what a fine is supposed to do, but rarely, in the case of corporations, achieves its desired affect.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
In working in data centers, I can totally see how this happened. Reading the actual source article, it reads like they had already connected the first circuit, and he got popped while working on the second. I would assume they had shut off both, installed the first PSU, then probably someone turned them BOTH back on instead of just the first one. When he went to connect the second PSU...
These are the kinds of accidents proper "change control" is supposed to stop, it seems no one working there really knew the over-all implementation plan. At our local data center, we have actual licensed electricians for high DC stuff, they know to "never trust always test". Even though we contract all that out too, we try to make sure the people on the site are aware of these things via bright stickers, lock-outs, etc. I have no idea if they have required licensing and training for their "cable jointer" positions in the UK.
"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
Isn't it sad that data center downtime is far more expensive than permanent downtime for a human being?
What's sad about it? Downtime creates downtime for other human lives too. At some point, you have to acknowledge that this is a trade off, a person assumes risk to their own lives in order to make other peoples' lives better or more productive.
The mideast called - the said you were the ideal candidate for their new landmine detection program.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.