{"id":23130,"date":"2013-11-29T08:15:35","date_gmt":"2013-11-29T13:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23130"},"modified":"2013-11-29T08:16:46","modified_gmt":"2013-11-29T13:16:46","slug":"australian-railways-chinese-made-locomotives-falsely-certified-as-asbestos-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/29\/australian-railways-chinese-made-locomotives-falsely-certified-as-asbestos-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian railway’s Chinese-made locomotives falsely certified as asbestos-free"},"content":{"rendered":"

A growing concern for companies that deal with Chinese businesses is when safety is compromised and (as in this case) required safety certifications are falsified<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Railway workers have been exposed to potentially hazardous asbestos after the deadly dust was found in locomotives brought in from China.<\/p>\n

The breach of a 10-year ban on the import of products containing the carcinogenic fibre is not the first incident of its kind.<\/p>\n

Unions are now demanding tougher policing of Chinese imports, describing the current asbestos-free certificates as a farce.<\/p>\n

Last year freight carrier SCT imported 10 locomotives made by China Southern Rail (CSR) to tow iron ore bound for China to port.<\/p>\n

To comply with the decade-old Australian ban on asbestos imports, they were certified asbestos-free. However, this was not the case.<\/p>\n

National secretary of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union Bob Nanva says maintenance workers raised concerns about the dust.<\/p>\n

“We had our maintenance workers repairing a number of diesel engines,” he said.<\/p>\n

“They identified a lot of white dust among those engines and asked the question as to whether or not that dust was safe.”<\/p>\n

The workers’ concerns were justified. White asbestos — or chrysotile — was found throughout the locomotives, in insulation around the exhaust and muffler system, around coolant pipes and in the brake exhaust section near the roof of the driver’s cabin.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This is not the first time China has broken the Australian ban on asbestos.<\/p>\n

Last year more than 25,000 Chinese-made Great Wall, Chery and Geely cars were recalled after asbestos was discovered in their engine gaskets and brakes. <\/p>\n

In decades to come experts expect hundreds of thousands of Chinese casualties from asbestos.<\/p>\n

A 1980s film by Szechuan University smuggled out from China shows the tragic story of China’s own Wittenoom — at Dayao, in the province of Yunnan — where asbestos exposures had led to the fatal cancer — mesothelioma.<\/p>\n

Back in Australia, it was the same type of blue asbestos, from the Wittenoom mine, that lined Melbourne’s blue Harris trains, potentially poisoning passengers when the walls were broken.<\/p>\n

So dangerous were the trains they were sealed in plastic and buried in quicksand at a quarry in Clayton.<\/p>\n

Blue asbestos, which is more likely to cause the cancer mesothelioma, is now banned in both countries — but China is now the world’s largest user of white asbestos, which Perth’s asbestos expert Professor Bill Musk warns still causes cancer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Craig Zeni for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A growing concern for companies that deal with Chinese businesses is when safety is compromised and (as in this case) required safety certifications are falsified: Railway workers have been exposed to potentially hazardous asbestos after the deadly dust was found in locomotives brought in from China. The breach of a 10-year ban on the import […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,831,22,237],"tags":[859],"class_list":["post-23130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-business","category-china","category-railways","tag-manufacturing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-614","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23132,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23130\/revisions\/23132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}