This is turning into a real “gong show”!!!

I’m only guessing here, but is it possible that the burden of proof to lay charges under the Workers Compensation Act is higher than what is necessary to lay the fine?

That could make one acceptable even though the other would not be. They aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A million dollar fine? Who is the recipient of the “fine”? The Crown? Kinda like the judge fining a guy for beating his wife? Beat up yer spouse and the “Crown” benefits by getting money from a guilty party? Worksafe entitled to the fine? Xmas bonuses for every one at Worksafe if we get the dough and the appeal is unsuccessful? Money changing hands? Keep up the good work, boys. Tragedies cured with a few bucks? Not good. IMO.

That’s why I said this is a gong show Harb.

The families of the dead and injured are not allowed to sue anyone, yet the very agency that “screwed up” the investigation s suing the sawmill owners? We know absolutely none of that money will go to the victims or their families?

These victims and their families are still on the sidelines holding the bag of crap they’ve been handed!

What makes this even more of a tragic comedy is the owners of Babine Forest Products gets to sue Mitsubishi Motors for the motor that sparked which triggered the fire and explosion.

Nice… everyone gets to sue everyone else except the victims and their families who lost the most!!!

This is all so F’ed up!!!

This is exactly why a public inquiry is necessary. Of course the company would appeal, to do less would be an admission of fault. Money for the survivors is not the issue, after all it does go to general revenue when a collection is made. The issue is an unbiased examination of what happened before, during and after. To discover what pre- empted the explosion and to find if there was culpability or not. The well published bungling of the investigation practically assures a successful appeal in my humble opinion.

This is exactly why a public inquiry is necessary. Of course the company would appeal, to do less would be an admission of fault. Money for the survivors is not the issue, after all it does go to general revenue when a collection is made. The issue is an unbiased examination of what happened before, during and after. To discover what pre- empted the explosion and to find if there was culpability or not. The well published bungling of the investigation practically assures a successful appeal in my humble opinion.

“What makes this even more of a tragic comedy is the owners of Babine Forest Products gets to sue Mitsubishi Motors for the motor that sparked which triggered the fire and explosion.”

Mitsubishi doesn’t make electric motors, three phase motors don’t spark unless there is a mechanical failure like a bearing failure. Good luck with the lawsuit! Was the so called sparking device installed in regards to the manufacturers instructions? Can the company prove that they followed the proper maintenance of that product? My guess is no!

Sorry for your loss Johnlittle but a public enquiry would prove what and result in what action that isn’t happening already?

Pardon me Mitsubishi does make electric motor but since the motors are three phase there is no brush arcing like a DC motor has.

So it’s Toshiba, big deal, maybe Hampton can make some money off of this tragedy? Recoup their losses by blaming and suing some other company sounds about right.

The motors were Toshiba, I believe. Not Mitsubishi.

Japanese electric motors gained market share in North America at the expense of domestic motor manufacturers by the Japanese following the ideas of one W. Edwards Deming, an American statistical analyst who advocated manufacturers reduce their costs by not building any excess capacity into their products.

The Americans (initially) rejected his ideas as being nutty. They didn’t want product failures creating a reputation for machines that wouldn’t stand up. Prior to Deming’s ideas being adopted by Japanese manufacturers, an American or Canadian made electric motor of say, 5 hp, was capable of carrying a sustained load of more than 5hp. And an intermittent one of perhaps twice that.

It would get warm, but it wouldn’t burn out ~ likely the heater protection in the magnetic switch that controls it would trip first, or a fuse would blow in the safety switch before it got to the point where the motor itself would go on fire. And it would just stop once the juice was interrupted by these safety devices.

In contrast, a Japanese made Toshiba motor rated at 5 hp will carry just that much load, and not one iota more.

People who have had them and burned a few of them out, (and I’m one of them), quickly realise it requires heater protection sized for a load of less than the motor’s rated capacity. If it doesn’t have that, and it gets an overload on it, it will be toast before the heaters will trip or a fuse will blow.

You would think this little fact, once it became known, would have caused rejection of Japanese made motors in favour of the domestic competition. It didn’t. Instead the domestic motor manufacturers all ‘cheapened up’ their motors to try to compete with the Japanese in price. The ones that are left, that is.

So this puts somewhat of a different spin on specifying electric motors where there may be a chance of periodic overloads. Something quite common in sawmills, and especially ones that had conveyor systems designed for way less waste than would now likely be going into them cutting dead, decadent and dried out bug killed pine.

The old idea of having the smallest hp motor needed to pull the usual load no longer applies ~ now you need to have a larger motor to have any reserve capacity in it at all, and to ensure it won’t burn up unexpectedly. And possibly cause your mill to burn down or explode if dry, fine dust happens to be present in the air under the right conditions.

Excellent. Sock it to them. Get money back that came out of the taxpayer pocket to investigate this.

Nobody is suing anyone. They got fined. They deserve it. They had an unsafe workplace.

5HP is 5HP in North America and Japan. Motors are designed for continuous duty and intermittent duty. You don’t buy an intermittent duty motor for a contiuous duty job. They are also rated with something called a sevice factor, for example a service factor of 1.15 on a 10HP motor means that it can be safely run at 11.5HP without causing damage to the motor. Nameplate data will tell you if the motor is an intermittent or continuous duty design. That same nameplate data will tell you the full load amps of that motor so you can size the overload heaters and fusing according to the Canadian Electrical code. Overload heaters are sized in accordance with the FLA of the motor and it’s service factor. So good luck suing the motor manufacturer when there are so many variables to selecting the proper motor for the job then installing and maintaining that motor properly once installed. The first thing that is changed when a motor trips out too often is the overload heater size! This will eventually cause the motor to fail due to it being run beyond its design capability!

5hp is indeed 5hp in both places. An engineer no doubt specified the motors sized for the load expected when the mill was constructed.

To avoid the necessity of large power factor correction most motors are sized for the average load they’re expected to pull, and there has long been an understanding that in any sawmill environment there may be periodic overloads.

Which of a long enough duration would normally trip the breakers or blow a fuse.

With Toshiba motors, a 5hp is certainly 5hp, same as a NA built one, but there is NO reserve capacity above that comparable to what used to be built into NA made motors. Which an engineer would no doubt be basing his specifications for motor sizing on.

THAT is how the Japanese made and sold them cheaper ~ they don’t have the copper in them the NA built motors had.

I know. I’ve had experience with them in my own sawmill, and what I observed has been confirmed independently by three different electrical contractors who’ve installed them in other settings, and then had to go back and replace them when they overloaded briefly and burned out.

Ergonomically, Toshiba put some nice features on their motors NA manufacturers failed to do on theirs. Toshibas have a connection box large enough to actually get your hands in to wire them up without taking all the skin off your fingers.

They have clearly marked their wires, and have a permanent metal plate wiring diagram you can actually read.

Even a couple of plastic caps on the grease nipples, if you ever have to grease the bearings for some reason or another.

They even provide a piece of keystock that fits the keyway.

But when they tell you what the horsepower is, that is it. It’s toast if you exceed it.

So did the motors have a marked service factor of 1 or 1.1? Not all motors are build the same. Different rotor designs give different torque vs speed regulation characturistics. Three phase motors are induction motors, the only way to improve their power factor is with capacitors. Once again the Candian electrical code dictates when the overload heater size should be reduced depending on where those capacitors are installed in the motor circuit. So did the engineers screw up? Wouldn’t the first time.

Well, that’s what we don’t know, NoWay. It was reported in an industry trade magazine that Hampton was suing the firm that supplied the motor that was suspected as being the source of ignition, and also named in the suit was the motor manufacturer.

Many industrial supply firms also provide ‘engineering services’ of sorts.

Where, if an original motor on a conveyor, say, had been replaced, (for any one of a variety of reasons, perhaps even as the result of a ‘Power Smart’ audit by Hydro to get something supposedly more ‘energy efficient’), they might have recommended the particular brand of motor they sell.

Which might be a motor of the same hp rating perhaps, but less able to stand-up to any overloads placed on it.

I’m sure you’ll find anyone who has had anything to do with re-winding electric motors will tell you there are some substantial differences between similar hp motors of different makes, even though they may all say their specs are the same on the label.

Generally speaking, I think most would tell you that a Baldor, for instance, is a better motor than a same sized Weg. And that’s why it costs more.

Hampton, in the USA, used to have an industrial supply division of its own called Hampton Power Products. They sold and serviced geared speed reducers, radicons, etc. So someone in their organisation must have had some knowledge of how motors are supposed to function in regards to their rated capacities, and possibly that knowledge forms part of the basis for their law suit against the supplier of the motor to Babine. In any case, we’ll just have to see how that proceeds.

Clean mills do not usually catch on fire when a motor burns up.

Still not suprised about the appeal. However, the burden of proof for criminal charges may not have been met. But that shouldn’t preclude Worksafe from levying fines.

I don’t care how clean your mill is. The fact is you cannot monitor EVERY motor every second of the day. The sawmilling process creates dust and quite a bit of it can accumulate in between clean up cycles.

Most motors these days are run to failure. Replacing the motor after a scheduled duty cycle just isn’t cost efficient for today’s companies. Run it till it drops is the mantra of most companies out there…

Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Baldor Westinghouse and the rest are built to Nema standards. To a trained eye the nameplate data will give you things like the rotor design letter code, specific duty information. Not all motors from the same manufacturer are build the same. Baldor has their Premium Efficiency Heavy Duty Super E line as well as their regular duty line. Was the motor ever replaced on the problem conveyor? Did they put the proper one back in? Did they use rewound motors to save a few bucks? Was the conveyor ever sped up with the poor practice of putting a bigger pulley on the motor? Was the amp draw checked after the modification? Were the proper overload heaters used? The motor manufacturer will ask all this in court.

That’s right, it will all come out in Court if the suit proceeds that far.

Cutting dry wood of any species can generate a lot of fine dust that definitely can accumulate on everything in the mill between end of day clean-ups.

The mills that are doing that were never designed to process a steady diet of that kind of wood, but that’s what the government mandates they’re going to have to cut. Prior to the two disasters, those kind of dry dust explosion problems were generally confined to re-man plants processing kiln dried stock.

Never heard of planner mills exploding even though they have been cutting and planning kiln dried lumber for decades.

As for these two explosions, the WorkSafe BS investigation reports states that they were preventable, how and by who, I guess we will never know… wouldn’t want to point fingers right?

This is a “shameful decision”!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/fine-for-babine-sawmill-owners-not-enough-victims-families-say/article17822101/

Questions: so what kind of fine does WorkSafe BS get for botching their investigation?