Jon »
06 December 2007 »
In Mines, Occupational Safety and Health, Transparency, underground systems »
Celeste Monforton of The Pump Handle
has a disturbing account of the current status of the Crandall Canyon disaster: Congress has cancelled scheduled hearings; even more disturbing, there’s an emerging record of failure(s) to report hazards as required - and what appears to have been the willful destruction of evidence.
Disturbing any way you look at it - assuming that you think workplaces ought to be safe. (If you don’t think that, I’m afraid my advocacy skills may not be up to the challenge).
Link to Dr. Monforton’s piece at The Pump Handle. We’ll try to follow up.
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Jon »
06 October 2007 »
In DOD, IEDs, Iraq, Making Things Worse, Mines, procurement »
It appears that in 2004, U.S. military officials evaluated an African-designed and manufactured MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles. The Corps of 
Engineers wanted it for its own personnel; David Axe of War Is Boring reports:
The urgency surrounding the multi-billion-dollar purchase of blast-resistant vehicles for the U.S. military is new, but the vehicles themselves are anything but. “They all hail back to southern African designs,” says Doug Coffey, spokesman for BAE., which builds the RG-33 armored truck. The roughly dozen “Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected” models, all with v-shaped hulls, have their roots in vehicles designed in the 1970s to counter road mines laid by black African guerillas during the Rhodesian “Bush War.”
Considering the provenance of today’s MRAPs, it’s perhaps surprising that one of the most successful African designs has been entirely absent from the U.S. program. The absence says more about politics and industrial considerations that it does about the virtues of particular designs. The Wolf, a 10-ton blast-resistant truck from Namibian state-owned manufacturer WMF, has served in the Danish, German and Namibian armies as well as with non-military agencies, the first of several hundred entering service in 1984. The latest model, the Wer’Wolf, debuted in 2000 and was quickly adopted by the Namibian army.
Clearly the Pentagon was aware of Wer’Wolf even before the belated launch of the MRAP program in late 2006. But when the Marine Corps began handing out production contracts for MRAP trucks in January 2007, small firms including Protected Vehicles and Force Protection, Inc, both based in South Carolina, were among the winners, but WMF was nowhere to be found. What happened?
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