Day 217 - 09 02 96 - Page 52
DAY 217
1 question at the moment.
2
3 Then the last point on this map where the sterilization
4 facilities were inadequate was the fat trimming area.
5 These fat trimmers use a circular saw or a circular knife
6 that is electrically operated, and they trim off fat off
7 the carcass from the abdomen of the cattle, and that saw
8 gets very dirty during the operation. They do not
9 sterilize it during the operation at all, but they should
10 have a sterilizer where they can put the knife -- it is a
11 specially built sterilizer that prevents the knife, the
12 electrical part of the knife being immersed into the water,
13 but allows the sterilization of the knife part that comes
14 into contact with the -- they did not have that. That was
15 under discussion and the Jarrets had actually promised to
16 have one installed. You would have to move then onto the
17 -----
18
19 Q. If you want to go on with this exercise by all means, let
20 us go to the small scale map.
21 A. The cutting hall?
22
23 Q. Yes, I was going to ask you about that.
24 A. The general problem with the cutting hall was, as
25 I said before, was the lack of -- boning hall is a very
26 different area from slaughter hall. Usually, we try to
27 prevents the use of water during the operation as much as
28 possible and we do not necessarily encourage sterilization
29 of knives between every cut, as you can understand, men are
30 cutting continuously. But what is encouraged is that the
31 men change their knives regularly, perhaps with every 10 or
32 15 minutes, during the operation, since we think that we
33 are dealing with clean material anyway here.
34
35 But the way in which the hygiene is kept adequate in a
36 boning hall is to immerse all the equipment, including the
37 metal aprons, the cutters used, including the metal gloves
38 they use, and including their knives and all the other
39 instruments during every break in usually a large
40 sterilizer. You can imagine that the small knives
41 sterilizers are not equipped to handle gloves and aprons,
42 for example.
43
44 This was missing from this cutting hall, and it was agreed
45 with Jarrets and Mr. Bone and Mr. Cross, the boning hall
46 supervisor, that was a serious short-coming, particularly
47 now that the boning hall was over-stretched in its
48 capacity, and installation of one was more or less agreed,
49 I understand. I find it disappointing that it is not
50 marked on this map because it probably means it has not
51 been installed.
52
53 Q. That is as may be, but can I ask you, do you agree that
54 those batch knife sterilizers marked in the cutting room
55 existed?
56 A. Yes, they did exist. They were just like the other
57 knife sterilizers, but they were -- perhaps they were -- a
58 normal knife sterilizer in a slaughter hall had the
59 capacity of holding, perhaps, two knives. These had the
60 capacity of holding eight knives, but there was no capacity
52
