Marine Clerk Fatally Injured in Rubber Tired Gantry Crane Incident [Long Beach, California – 15 January 2022]
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With great regret and a substantial amount of empathy for our LA/LGB colleagues, information coming to Blueoceana Company indicates that an extremely popular and well liked marine clerk (who doubled as an ILWU port security guard) lost his life in what has been confirmed to be an RTG run-over yesterday afternoon (15 January) at the Pier T facility in Long Beach, CA.
Mr. Chulaih Nidhijessadawongsa, a proud and hard working Thai-American who hailed from the Udon-Thani province of his native land and who had been an officer in the Royal Thai Customs Service, was run over by a backside wheel set of an RTG working the CC500 section stacks at the Total Terminals (TTI) facility.
Thus far press coverage has been minimal; replicative of the modest narrative set out below.
We do know that at least three separate investigations have begun, and hope that their results will include a means and methodology with which to prevent any similar type of occurrence.
That being said, it’s certainly worth noting that going back through the listings of fatal accidents occurring within the global marine cargo handling industry found at this website’s “BULLETINS” page covering the last several months, at least three such accidents involved personnel being run over by the wheels of these very large container handling machines. Moreover, two of those accidents took place at very large U.S. marine terminals.
Losses like this should be considered unacceptable, and worthy of immediate remedy.
Exemplar Media Account:
2 Comments
1974 in Norfolk International Terminals we witnessed the same accident with the same results but it was a checker with five (5) days of experience. He walked out from two (2) rows of containers on the wrong side, RTG wheels were only a foot from containers.
It is with great regret that we hear of Mr. Nidhijessadawongsa’s fate. It should be noted that obstruction detection for RTGs is available technology and should be employed and maintained to help avoid such events. However, even such technology cannot prevent all events. Factors such as machine momentum limit the protection these systems provide. RTGs traveling at full speed require quite a distance to come to a stop once an obstruction is detected. It might be time to seriously explore RFID tags, or similar technology, on personnel to detect their presence when working around container handling equipment.