Auckland port: another serious incident revealed, night-shift culture criticised
Tuesday, 8 September 2020
Auckland port workers speaking out after their colleague was crushed to death claim a lax culture towards safety exists on the wharves during graveyard shifts. Meanwhile, details have emerged of another serious safety violation at the port, just days after Amo Kalati died. George Block reports.
Ports of Auckland stevedores say a cavalier attitude to safety prevails during graveyard shifts, where speed comes at the expense of good practice.
Their comments came after Pala’amo (Amo) Kalati was crushed to death by a container on a ship on Sunday, August 30.
Stuff can also reveal a serious safety violation happened at the port on Thursday, just days after 31-year-old lasher Kalati died.
**READ MORE:
* 'Devoted family man' Amo Kalati named as wharfie who was crushed to death
* Auckland wharfies make claims of lax safety, near-miss before man was crushed
**
It’s understood a hulking container ship hatch cover weighing more than 30 tonnes was craned onto a container while port workers remained on the deck, in what one veteran wharfie described as a major safety violation.
In response, work on both container ships at the terminal that day was stopped. Workers were called to appear before a senior operations manager, who told them to take more responsibility for safety.
“We were all called in and really given a rark-up,” said one worker present at the meeting.
“[He said] ‘you guys have to take some responsibility for what you're doing’.”
The following day, Maritime NZ took the rare move of issuing the Ports of Auckland (POAL) with a notice to improve safety, citing several safety and procedural violations before Kalati's death.
Several current stevedores at POAL spoke to Stuff to shed light on what they described as years of lax safety on the city wharves.
They requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the press and faced professional consequences for doing so.
One wharfie with decades of experience said there was a lack of supervision on the night shift, along with a culture of speed and productivity above all else.
All who spoke to Stuff said the speed of work on the night shift was significantly higher than on day shifts.
Ports of Auckland declined to comment.
The experienced wharfie said supervisors fostered a culture of working as quickly as possible by calling in straddle carrier drivers or crane operators who failed to hit a certain number of container “moves” per shift.
“There is a culture on the night shift that 'we’re just a little bit better than you day-shift guys’,” he said.
“It's got worse and worse. It's all about speed, speed, speed.”
He echoed the comments of the Maritime Union's Auckland Local 13 secretary Russell Mayn, who called for an end to 12-hour-long overnight shifts.
Mayn described the shifts as a recipe for disaster, saying they should be cut to eight hours.
The 12-hour shifts were introduced several years ago. Both deaths of stevedores in recent years happened during the night shift.
The wharfie said the work was intensely physically demanding, whether for lashers who must secure or unload containers using heavy lashing bars, or straddle drivers, who sat high above the ground undertaking work which required intense focus at they moved over rough surfaces on the port.
The result was workers who resembled the living dead at the end of their shift and who had no time or energy for their families, he said.
“The last two to three hours, they’re really dragging their heels.
“Their eyes are sticking out. They’re like zombies.”
Another POAL worker slammed safety at the port, saying he was nearly killed by a straddle carrier being driven too fast.
“Lax doesn't even begin to describe it.”
In 2016, the worker began keeping a personal log of various safety incidents and near-misses he experienced.
They included dangerous lashing practices exposing workers to the risk of being struck by heavy lashing bars, and stevedores working at heights without safety gear such as harnesses.
When raising safety issues with shift managers he was told “what happens on night shift stays on night shift”, he said.
“I can't quit because it's my income. I can't tell anybody because I feel intimidated,” he wrote at the time.
Diary entries from June 2018 describe several near-misses involving speeding straddle carriers.
Two months later, Laboom Midnight Dyer, 23, suffered critical injuries after a straddle carrier he was driving tipped to its side on August 27, 2018.
He died in hospital five days later. POAL admitted a health and safety charge in August 2020 at Auckland District Court.
The worker, along with other port sources, said Dyer had an extremely high “box rate”, a measure of the number of containers moved per hour.
The worker said Dyer drove quickly to chase performance bonuses given for fast work, and like many other drivers was known to frequently activate the vehicle’s “tip alarm”, warning the carrier was at risk of tipping over.
In a log entry dated less than two weeks after Dyer's death, the worker said nothing had changed to improve safety.
The company had not emphasised pre-drive inspections, slowed down the straddle carrier or increased the sensitivity of the tip alarms by the time he returned to work after Dyer’s death, he wrote.
Since 2017, there have been three deaths associated with health and safety breaches involving Ports of Auckland.
Before Kalati and Dyer’s deaths, a POAL pilot boat accidentally struck and killed ocean swimmer Leslie Gelberger.
The company was fined $424,000, and skipper Grant More fined $8400, for failing to comply with health and safety duties and exposing an individual to a risk of death or serious injury.
In March 2015, the port was fined $55,000 and ordered to pay $25,000 to stevedore Neil Bower after he broke several bones in a 15-metre fall the previous year.
Bower fell from a container and hit a crane beam and the wharf before landing in the water.
Months after Bower’s injury, in October 2014, a stevedore was injured after falling through an unprotected hatch aboard a ship. The company was fined $50,000 following a prosecution by Maritime New Zealand.