Day 209 - 25 Jan 96 - Page 18
1 A. Yes, sure, OK.
2
3 Q. -- you say anything about that paragraph.
4
5 MR. MORRIS: Yes. I would appreciate it if you yourself do not
6 understand because this is quite a complicated issue. You
7 can ask questions.
8
9 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You carry on. I am merely suggesting that
10 if, for instance -- you just keep reading steadily until
11 there is some comment to make, but if you can hold your
12 comment until you get to the end of the paragraph.
13 A. Yes.
14
15 MR. MORRIS: "Grills: An RCD system was installed approximately
16 two years ago. This system was to act as a safety device
17 to avoid the risk of electric shock from the grills. Due
18 to a fault in the installation of the system, the grills
19 regularly tripped out during busy periods. There would be
20 very little indication that the grills had tripped out so
21 sometimes products were served which were undercooked.
22
23 "This tripping out sometimes happened so frequently that
24 the trip fuse was removed altogether due to the pressure of
25 work. To my knowledge, the Store Managers and Senior
26 Supervisor were aware of the problem and took the same
27 action themselves of removing the trip switch for short
28 periods. This problem continued for a very long period of
29 time".
30 A. Can I explain that top section, because there seems to
31 be some dispute about when the RCD trips whether it shows
32 up, and initially, in my memory, when it was installed,
33 when it tripped out it did not take the whole system with
34 it. What they are talking about there is when what is
35 called the HVAC, which sucks the air up away from the, you
36 know, the smoke and stuff away from the grills, when that
37 detects smoke in the smoke detectors upstairs, it has got
38 through, the whole system can trip out, and that would turn
39 everything off.
40
41 But what I am talking about was when the RCDs were first
42 installed, one trip used to go and what would happen is the
43 grills would look like they were on because all the little
44 heat lights at the bottom of the grills would come on, and
45 they were clam shell grills and the pneumatics would still
46 work because that did not seem to be attached to the
47 current that fed the heat for the grills. So, the grills
48 would indicate that they were heating up when, in fact, no
49 power was getting to them, so the temperature would
50 gradually drop and you would only realise after you had
51 looked at the meat and realised after one or two runs that
52 it was beginning to go brown, it was beginning to go
53 greyish, and then you would know that there was something
54 wrong and then you could check one. But by the time you
55 noticed that, you could almost guarantee you had sent over
56 a run of 12 hamburgers and six Big Macs by that point that
57 were, you know, undercooked.
58
59 But that is my recollection of it. I remember that they
60 came -- they did try and come and fix them and they might
