Day 209 - 25 Jan 96 - Page 25
1 MR. JUSTICE BELL: We will take our five minutes now.
2
3 (Short Adjournment)
4
5 MR. MORRIS: Moving on to chicken vats, from your statement:
6 "The vats used to cook the chicken nuggets and patties
7 were extremely unreliable, often tripping out, giving no
8 immediate or obvious indication that they had done so.
9 This sometimes meant undercooked chicken was served before
10 anyone was able to notice the problem. The problem was
11 sometimes only noticed when a customer brought back raw
12 food. Complaints about chicken were usually dealt with in
13 the same way as complaints about raw beef, due to the
14 pressure of work."
15 A. Can I stop there and say that in the statements other
16 people have given, they have said the RCD system, but I was
17 not -- the RCD tripping out would show, the whole thing
18 would turn you off; and I agree with that. But what I am
19 saying here is there was a specific vat that was used to
20 cook the chicken patties and the chicken nuggets. This one
21 particular vat, the gas did not ignite on it properly
22 occasionally, and all that would come on is a tiny little
23 light at the bottom of the vat, saying trouble, but the
24 timer would still be on and the chicken would still look
25 cooked initially, for the first few runs, because the oil
26 would still be hot; and the timer, the timer used to
27 automatically adjust the time, according to the
28 temperature, so it would leave the chicken in longer, it
29 would leave the chicken in the vat longer to make up for
30 the lower temperature; but after a couple of runs, it
31 cannot possibly recover temperature, because there is no
32 heating coming in, so the chicken is going to come out
33 raw. If one person is doing fillet and pie -- which is
34 what the chicken station is called -- and that was normally
35 the case, except on Saturday, it would be -- this one
36 person would have to do chicken nuggets, chicken
37 sandwiches, all the pies, all the fillet, and stock their
38 area up and keep it clean. So they were very busy in
39 fillet and pie; it was recognised as a very difficult
40 station to do. So one tiny little light, it was missed on
41 several occasions.
42
43 This tiny light, you just did not -- you know, it was a
44 little thing saying trouble at the bottom of the grill, at
45 the bottom of the vat, and there were lots of other lights
46 there as well, and, unless you knew what you were looking
47 for, you would not notice it.
48
49 I became -- I used to manage the kitchen a lot, and
50 I became very aware of it, and I was always looking out for
51 it. But I could never spend my whole time looking out to
52 see whether the trouble light had come on or not. I used
53 to try and make crew members aware of it. You would
54 forget. That could be my fault, perhaps. But people did
55 not look at it and did not notice. Some of them did not
56 even know what it meant, that the trouble light was on,
57 because everything looked like it was going fine.
58
59 But it was not the RCD system there. If the RCD on the
60 chicken tripped, the whole station went out, everything
