Following an incident last week in which a Genie Z135.70 articulated boom lift tipped over at Melbourne University, Genie National Operation Manager Mitchell Ely has sent a letter to all owners of the unit.
The company has has advised owners of the cause of the incident and is in the process of of carrying out inspections and repairs to all these machines in Australia.
Owners are advised to remove these booms from service until the repairs are completed.
“Genie has given this serious matter our full attention and has been working continuously to determine the cause of this accident,” Ely writes.
“Our senior engineers from the US have already viewed the machine and commenced their investigations into the incident which involves full cooperation with Victorian Work Safe.”
“The machine in question uses two switches to control the range of motion of the secondary boom.”
“These switches provide redundancy for the range of motion control system. We have determined that the switches in this system on the affected machine had been damaged and were not working correctly resulting in a chain of events leading up to the incident.”
Victorian Work Safe has advised Genie Australia to remove all Z135.70 boom lifts from service until the two limit switches have been inspected for correct operation.
Genie Australia will be applying these inspections to all Z135.70 Boom Lifts currently operating across the country.
“Our service department is currently gearing up to perform the inspections and they will ensure any inconvenience is kept to a minimum,” Ely writes.
“Our State Service Managers have been briefed on the matter and we plan to commence inspecting units as early as tomorrow.”
“Our Service Managers will be in contact with your team within the next 24 hours to finalise the inspection schedule.”
“From myself and the team at Genie we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience,” he writes.
“Please be assured that Genie will do its utmost to ensure that the highest level of safety is maintained at all times.”
If companies have any concerns they should contact Mitchell Ely directly.