Verbal abuse, a windscreen shattered by a mystery object, and the discovery of a firearm while sampling river water are just some of the ordeals Southland council employees have faced.<\/p>\n
By Matthew Rosenberg for Local Democracy Reporting<\/p>\n
Notable situations were captured in a recent Environment Southland report which also showed the organisation had struggled to find a new health and safety manager.<\/p>\n
One incident involved shattered glass falling on a driver when something hit the windshield behind the lowered sunvisor as they travelled on a highway, the report said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs there was no traffic near the vehicle or any other obvious factors, the exact cause of the glass shattering remains unknown,\u201d council general manager people Amy Kubrycht told Local Democracy Reporting.<\/p>\n
Other incidents included a female employee being approached by a male while unloading boxes after hours; sunstrike resulting in one vehicle clipping another; and verbal abuse aimed at Emergency Management and pest plant personnel while out on the job.<\/p>\n
Water sampling had led to an unexpected discovery on one occasion, when an employee found a firearm in a river and alerted police. No further action was taken, the report said.<\/p>\n
It also noted there had been two unsuccessful recruitment rounds for the council\u2019s health and safety manager role, and Kubrycht revealed the council had been without a manager for about six months.<\/p>\n
The daily health and safety responsibilities of council had been managed by the health and safety coordinator prior to an interim manager being appointed in March, Kubrycht said.<\/p>\n
A total of 569 speeding events were recorded in work cars for the January to March period, up from 477 for the same period last year.<\/p>\n
\u2013 LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Verbal abuse, a windscreen shattered by a mystery object, and the discovery of a firearm while sampling river…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,135,15488,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-473644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-southland","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}