WESTERN BUREAU – Chairman of All Island Jamaica Cane Farmers Association Allan Rickards is charging that a bridged switch triggered the turbine explosion, which subsequently resulted in the death of a machinist at the Long Pond Sugar Estate last month.

Rickards said the switch was rigged in an attempt to get the crop season started.

“There is a governor switch which should trip out when there is a problem and the machinery would cease to operate,” said Rickards.

“This was bridged with a welding rod … this was my understanding. I am saying that this was what we were told and this is the report. These reports are rampant and everybody knows it. If it is not so, let them say so,” Rickards said Wednesday at an emergency meeting between members of the All Island Jamaica Cane Farmers Association in Trelawny.

But, despite the serious allegations, the Sugar Company of Jamaica refused comment.

“I have absolutely no comment at this time. There is a process and I am going through the process,” said SCJ chief executive officer Livingston Morrison, contacted by the Observer after the cane farmers meeting.

“Wherever the chips fall, that is where it is going to stay.”

Rickards accused the company of desperation, saying “they were so embarrassed with the state of the machinery and so anxious to keep as close to their final deadline of the 28th (of February) that in desperation they did nonsense.”

Morrison on Tuesday had acknowledged receiving the report in the investigation of the March 31 fatal accident at the sugar factory. He got the report on April 15.

He, however, declared that he could not make its findings public, saying to do so would compromise the implementation process recommended in the document.

“The full report will be available at some time in the future but any attempt to make public the report right now would undermine the investigation that is continuing,” he told the Observer, adding that the SCJ was also seeking clarification on a number of points in the report.

Morrison had appointed a four-member team to investigate the cause of the accident at the Trelawny factory after Kagel Insang, a 23 year-old machinist, was killed in a turbine explosion.

Two other workers – Michael Walcott and Garnet Ferguson – were injured in the blast.

Preliminary indications are that a gearbox that drives the cane ‘knife’ had disintegrated. The explosion sent chunks of metal flying into the factory, hitting the workers.