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Updated 9.24pm
A TURKISH COURT has charged three people with manslaughter over a mine disaster that killed 301 people, the prosecutor in charge of the probe said.
“Twenty-five people have been taken, detained and three of them have been charged with manslaughter,” prosecutor Bekir Sahiner told reporters in the western town of Soma where the country’s worst ever mining disaster took place.
Detained
Earlier today, Turkish police detained 24 people, including mining executives, suspected of negligence over the disaster that killed 301 people and sparked fury at the government and officials, local media reported.
Rescue operations ended yesterday after the bodies of the last two trapped miners were retrieved following the disaster.
The investigation begins
Dozens of prosecutors have been assigned to investigate the fire and explosion believed to have been sparked by an electrical fault at a private mine.
Among those detained is Akin Celik, general director of mine operator Soma Komur, NTV television reported. The suspects could face charges including manslaughter, it added.
Soma Komur has vehemently denied any negligence.
“We have all worked very hard. I have not seen such an incident in 20 years,” Celik said on Friday.
The labour ministry also denied culpability, saying the mine had been inspected every six months.
Expert report
A preliminary expert report on the accident obtained by the Milliyet newspaper pointed to several safety violations in the mine, including a shortage of carbon monoxide detectors and ceilings made of wood instead of metal.
The authenticity of the report could not be immediately verified.
A group of rescue workers told NTV that a cave-in had occurred in the mine after the ceilings burnt down and collapsed due to the fire.
Fury against the government
The Soma disaster has sparked a wave of fury against the government, adding to pressure on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of his expected run for the presidency in August.
Soma was in a virtual lockdown today after checkpoints were set up on the main roads leading to the town where all demonstrations were banned, AFP reporters on the scene said.
Only inspectors and security forces were allowed at the site of the disaster after the rescue teams had left.
Arrests yesterday
On Saturday, at least 36 people, including eight lawyers, were arrested and held in a stadium in Soma after they attempted to make a statement. Some of the lawyers were beaten and injured by police.
Images of police firing tear gas and water cannon at thousands of protesters in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir have also revived memories of the government’s heavy-handed crackdown against nationwide protests in 2013.
A total of 787 people were inside the mine when the blast hit, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said. Most of the victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
“I was very sad when I came here and I am still very sad,” Yildiz told reporters before leaving Soma, pledging support for the stricken families.
The disaster has added to the huge political pressure on Erdogan, whose Islamic-rooted party emerged triumphant from March 30 local elections despite a corruption scandal implicating key allies and last year’s mass protests.
- First published 4.45pm
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Like slurry pits and breweries I suppose?
http://www.bim.ie/training/safetytraining/. Would this not be a matter for the Irish Sea Fisheries Board training courses. If it was a construction site issue, it would be addressed in a Safe Pass day course. Surely it’s mandatory to do it before going onto a ship.
Although I suppose it could be an oderless hidden killer, training might not fix it.
There should be *free* mandatory day courses for farmers as well every two years say.
Thats like the mandatory one day course that all bus and lorry drivers must do every year. At a cost to themselves of course.
You have to do if for the ‘cert’. But as a mate said: “Loada lads, half of them without a word of english, sitting in a class for a day, getting a safety cert for something they are not even tested in afterwards. What could go wrong?”
We like our ‘courses’ in Ireland so we do. These certs keep trainers in jobs and officialdom get to pretend they are doing something proactive. Imagine a safety course with no theory or practice test at the end??? Just pay the money and get the cert and sure now its all cushdy
I would have thought that all boats/ ships would have some form of gas detection or portable detectors aboard? Considering the amount of confined spaces on them. You can buy a single gas detector calibrated for Hydrogen Cyanide which is cross sensitive to Hydrogen sulphide which are two of the three gases that the two crewmen were overcome by. A single gas instrument would cost a few hundred euro, which is a lot cheaper than a funeral. RIP to the Crewmen.
For the first responders out there especially those championing the useless Eircode. None of our harbours or quays have an Eircode and never will. Pat Rabbittes billing & taxing code will mean delsys for these types of accidents because better GPS based location codes are available. Welcome to Ireland where merit plays second fiddle to Labour political strokes.
Most quays and harbours are marked on maps and are usually located by the sea. Pretty sure 999 know where they are.
Don’t mind him Kev, any excuse for a rant about Eircodes. It’s a wonder the fool isn’t on about a missing Eircode on the Apple money too………damn sure if anyone dials 999 and says Killybegs quay or Kilmore Quay, or cliffs of Moher then they will have the intelligence to know.
Plenty of minor quays & harbours around the country & weren’t National Ambulance Service unable to find Wexford Quay six months ago. But hey lets settle for mediocrity… It’s what we do.
Let me guess loc8 codes would solve the problem.
Good guess…
So what your saying Get Lost, is that since the foundation of the state that emergency services have been unable to find beaches, quays, cliffs, harbours. People must be dying in their droves at these locations for the want of guided assistance. Your stubborn, outdated, ignorant rant is a pathetic insult to the work of the Coastguard, Lifeboat volunteers (God bless their bravery and commitment) and all the state emergency services who do so much. After months of you shoehorning your agenda into everything here on the Journal I really wish you would do exactly as your name implies and, GET LOST.
Anthony this is not about the emergency services finding places. This is about the public being able to accurately able to report the position of a casualty to the emergency services. We had, and still have the opportunity too introduce a code that can help with that.
Small story for you. October last year while out on a family cycle wife had an accident on a main road and ended up unresponsive. I asked a passerby to call 999 but the passerby didn’t know where we were to tell the operator. Now ECAS can take a Loc8code but NAS do not.
The woman passed here phone to me and i had by that time already used the Point8 app got generate a Loc8code with 6m accuracy buy by the time the phone had been passed to me the call had switched from ECAS to NAS.
Thinking i was still on to ECAS i called out the Loc8 code using the phonetic alphabet giving a quick and precise location. NAS operator said to me “Where did you get that? Google???” i responded that it was a Loc8 code and he said “we don’t use them”
So i responded that we were approximately 2km north of lucan on the Clonee road. NAS operator said sorry I don’t know where that is, WHAT COUNTY ARE YOU IN.
Eircode cannot help in this scenario repeated many times a day all over the country. If you cannot see the value of Loc8 code in this scenario you are a moron.
Ultimately we have a situation where the Department of Communication is hindering rapid access to causalities with their protectionist agenda towards the UNTESTED and half baked Eircode political postcode.
Also Vodafone had a serious outage yesterday so their data network was down. This means for anybody on the Vodafone network EIRCODE was totally unusable….enjoy.
First, and most importantly, I sincerely hope that your wife has made a full recovery from her injury. It obviously has had a deep and frightening effect upon you as it would with anyone.
I certainly see and understand your point.
Speaking as a former member of the rural emergency services, we trained and studied our butts off learning our area and in rural Ireland we have so many Gurteens and Newtowns and small unheard of towns lands. The 999 controllers are so expert at gathering information from panicked and frightened callers. They relay the often scant info to the crews and the crews know from our training and dedication, who, where and most importantly how quickly to get to the incident. Oversight from Government and EU showed that our response times and incident locating ability before Loc8 or Eircode were to be commended. We did often take GPS coordinates too. No system is perfect even the UKs postcode is flawed some 30 or more years into it.
However, in this tragic story Eircode or any other locating media is not mentioned, nor was there a difficulty locating the casualties location I believe.
Thanks Anthony. Suspected broken ribs and a bit dazed. She was unresponsive because she was badly winded. I managed to get her back on her bike and through a park to a retained fireman buddy who looked after her as she went into shock and i went to get the car to collect the kids 3 & 5 who were with us. 5 year old was distraught as his mammy crashed trying to avoid him and at one point he thought she was dead. Now my fireman buddy is actually the person who came up with the name GetLostEircodes and he also designed the logo. He also told me of 2 incidents last year in the park we had just traversed. One where a man jad just had a heart attack and emergency services couldn’t find him…he died. The other some teenagers had broken into a skateboard park after hours and had fallen badly breaking his collar bone in such a way as to nearly bleed to death.. again emergency services had great difficulty finding him. Gary Delaneys Loc8codes can be put on existing signs in parks or on posts on waymarked trails such as wicklow way, mayo greenway or even canals. More tech savvy can use their smartphone. Loc8 is tried tested and proven and is used by disaster planners for that reason. It was for example used to close off roads during the Manx Air crash. Don’t for one minute think that Rabbitte, White, Naughten or the department have any interest in assisting emergency services who were never consulted at all on Eircode. DCENR have been actively trying to scupper Gary since 2010 and we are all the poorer as a result. My point in this story is there are hundreds of minor harbours, quays and jettys on both our coastal & inland waterways and they will never get an Eircode. A simple Loc8code on a Quay wall or fence post will identify the location accurately saving valuable time. DCENR are now promoting app with non hierarchical random What3Words from UK…anybody but Loc8.
Yes, Glad it was not a very serious injury. Scary one especially as you had young children to manage too, as I said I fully understand where your coming from.
And agree!
Loc8 is superior as long as one has a device that’s working etc. It’s a good system and I suspect that the Eircode was well in play and probably deals done with vested interests before Loc8. They had been rattling on about Eircode in the late 80′s. Using inferior or not using alternative information sources or being open to using better information in emergency situations is criminal.
This article is misleading the crewmen Rip died because of refrigeration gas, there was a fault in the refrigeration system, gas had leaked & do to the boat being moored for a period of time it had settled into the confined space, at the bottom of the fish hold tank. as the crew men climbed down he entered an area with poisonous gas & NO OXYGEN. The second crewman tried to safe him but was also overcome, A regrettable accident & very rare due to the high standard of maintenance & training . Crews are trained about fumes in confined space from engines etc but they are detectable by alarms & also smell, this was in a tank that is usually filled with sea water so normal alarms/ detector would not work as they would need to be salt waterproof they could not detect gases.. Also it if very very rare that refrigeration gases leaks & even rarer that it would find it’s way to a tank.RIP
Confined space entry training for all spaces not considered a normal place of work should be provided to workers, this type of accident happens quite a bit unfortunately
How very sad is that!!
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