Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Shaun Lott,
I have no idea how complex the logistics really are, but progress does seem to have remained at a frustratingly slow place, especially if we are really considering it likely that at least some miners have survived the blast.
Well, sure: it's frustrating. But it is complex, you are talking about "impressions", and given that there could not possibly be one more iota of pressure on all concerned to get things sorted ASAP, I'm not sure how the speculation helps. In particular, given that robots are absolutely not standard mine rescue equipment, it's not surprising at all that it would take time to organise them, and longer to get them in from the US and Australia. You'd have trouble getting people over here immediately, and that's without having to ascertain that the robot is in fact at all suited for the job.
-
Up Front: The Up Front Guides: How to Be…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Briscoes has regular sales on minions, check your local paper.
Better yet: become a graduate science student. Undergraduates volunteer for minionship. If you play it right, you will never wash another dish.
(Okay, you will, but it will be many fewer dishes than you would have washed without minions.)
-
Nearly every vehicle (notably always the big trucks and SUVs) pulled as far out of their lane as possible to give me room. I waved to every one of them in thanks.
I actually find it a little disturbing how far Americans will pull out if you're walking on the verge. I have a 1km walk along a road with no footpaths - a house every ten metres or so, but no footpaths - to my bus stop. Cars will actually end up in the other lane - entirely in the other lane - to avoid me, even if I'm a good metre in from the road. It's courteous, certainly, but a bit of an overreaction.
-
When I said that even I could come up with a concept for a rescue vehicle which could move in a high methane atmosphere without raising the risk of explosion
James, there's no chance you're a physicist, is there?
If it can’t be done in reasonably guaranteed safety, leave it until in can be. Surely in a modern social democatic society it is untenable to employ people to do a job if there is a strong possibility many will be killed doing it?
The problem with your uninformed blathering about how an entire industry should be run is that risk is always, always relative. What's "reasonably guaranteed"? What if it was, by your standards, reasonably guaranteed? You don't know what the risks were. One incident, the cause of which has not yet been established, is not evidence in itself that the entire industry is impossibly risky and should be shut down. You talk about a "strong possibility" without any evidence that this was a strong possibility. It could have been a one-in-a-million accident. We. Don't. Know.
Oh, but, I'm sorry: you are the only defender of the truth against rigged commisions of inquiry. Do carry on with your fine demonstration of blame-laying.
(Don't.)
-
Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Sometimes it is risky to rescue but that is the job.
Perhaps you missed the part where a failed rescue could not only kill the rescuers, but the miners.
-
Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I'm also at rather a loss as to what "coverage of all workers" even means in the context of the New Zealand union situation. Or how the union could have "bargained safety away" to get it, when history suggests New Zealand mining is actually pretty safe.
-
Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to James George,
Either methane explosions are an uncontrollable reality of coal mining, in which case the mine should never have been allowed to open at all.
Right, then, let's shut down every industry in which there is the slightest possibility anyone could ever be killed, by anything. That's going to go well.
I'm no engineer but I can envisage the obstacles that a vehicle (manned or unmanned) designed to work in a volatile atmosphere would need to overcome, and I can envisage workable solutions to each of those potential problems. For example electric motors and their battery power supply can be built into a sealed module from where no spark could be generated, much less escape.
Helpful hint: when starting your sentences with "I'm no X but..." it's best not to go on to demonstrate within the same paragraph that you really do have no fucking clue about the problems you're so blithely offering solutions to.
-
I believe (though not for sure) that the samples were being flown to Rapahoe for testing by gas chromatography, I don’t think individual mines could be expected to have that sort of instrumentation on-site or staff qualified to run and analyse them when more simple gas analysis is normally sufficient. Anyway, I’m not arguing that these questions need to be asked, just saying there are often completely reasonable explanations when the facts are examined.
I do gas chromatography (for methane, even). It's not exceptionally difficult, but the equiptment is expensive and a little delicate and the testing is time-consuming. It's not the kind of thing you'd have just lying around if you didn't need it quite often - other labs in our department come and use ours rather than everyone getting their own, and they use it on a semi-regular basis. I'm not at all surprised they wouldn't have one on site.
but is there really no way for a small group of people wearing spark-free sneakers and airtight breathing gear to walk into the mine without risking an explosion?
The current reports sound like there could be an actual fire down there, not to mention the risk of spontaneous explosions at any time if gas levels are high enough. And if they are high, it could take little more than someone kicking a pebble the wrong way at the wrong time. That's all if the mine tunnel is even open all the way to where the men were - it could be blocked off; no-one knows. In that situation, you're basically sending rescuers off to uncertain death. And I think that's the last thing anyone wants.
(Also - to be grim - no-one even knows for certain that there is anyone to rescue. That has to be affecting how things proceed.)
-
Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Tim Michie,
"Different in many respects" barely covers it when you come to the differences between coal mines and gold mines. I don't think they're comparable at all.
-
Hard News: I'm not a "f***ing cyclist".…, in reply to JackElder,
There’s also a lot of cars turning into or pulling out of the aforementioned businesses;
For most of this year I was working at the Christchurch School of Medicine, which involved a bike ride to work turning right off Rolleston Ave, across a shared footpath/cyclepath, into the hospital driveway.
Cyclists would come barreling down the cyclepath at road speeds. I'd wait for the road to clear, start to turn right, then have to brake suddenly - often in the middle of the lane I was turning across - because in the time I'd turned they'd come zooming up. Similar problem leaving; there was a stop sign, but even after you'd stopped and checked, people could show up out of nowhere. If I'd hit a fellow cyclist, it would have just been inconvenient; given the number of cars and trucks coming in and out of there, it was a recipe for disaster, basically because you had to look not only at the two-way traffic on the road but two-way, road-speed traffic on the footpath.
I simply refused to use that cyclepath for my entire time there, because I felt a lot less safe with all the pedestrians around than I did on the road - and if I'd ridden at pedestrian-safe speeds on the cyclepath, my twenty-minute ride home would have taken forty. And that's sort of the thing: while it is entirely possible to be safe on the footpath, it goes a long way to negating the point of biking in the first place (i.e. being rather faster than walking).