gull

do severals, be severals. how it is

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what's up, gull and such here, recent "wait there's more than one of us" realizers. whoops!

still giant robot fans, still pmd: explorers enthusiasts. imagine we are wearing a big button that says "ask us about Void Stranger". you should play all the games we like right now. the media backlog continues to grow ever further, and finally fucking continuing Initial D slips further and further out of reach.....


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atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

rare occurrence: you fuck up so incredibly badly that an agency nobody has ever heard of issues an emergency order in the Federal Register that annihilates your entire company

that emergency order throws the following into much-needed contrast with what was actually going on at the company

"This is what Lite employee Sheree Pierce wrote to accompany the official email:"

Sending the below e-mail was the hardest thing I have had to do. I have worked with this company 9 years and have been the contact most of you have worked with. It was never the intention of this company for this to even remotely occur. We had some internal problems and PHMSA was working with us to get all this resolved. We did not ever feel any of you receiving this e-mail were in any danger. They wanted new management and new ownership.

We gave them all they asked for after being shut down for 8 months with no sales. We worked diligently to address any internal issues we had in the past that resulted in a failure in the field. After an incident which involved a cylinder that none of you have, they did the mandatory total recall of all cylinders ever made by Lite Cylinder.

All companies experience issues but I stand by this company and its product. Whether you were just a single order customer or one of our large customers it didn’t matter. I cherish you all. We all lose in this. On our side it’s our jobs and on your side it’s also financial. I would only hope that if Lite Cylinder could ever get past this recall all of you would still be our customers. Even though we won’t be here, we are appealing the recall but we don’t know what the outcome will be. I have enjoyed working with you and consider you my friends. May God bless each of you.


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in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

Takes a bit of scrolling, but this is a good table:

table showing 10% failure rate of cylinders

And this is a good quote:

Lite Cylinder had installed an alarm and automatic shutdown device to stop manufacturing if the hardening catalyst required to chemically weld the cylinder seams was not being properly added during the gluing process. Several Lite Cylinder employees provided statements that the alarm and automatic shutdown process had never functioned as designed, and indicated that the shutdown device had not stopped the manufacturing process when it should have detected insufficient hardening catalyst.

So's this:

PHMSA discovered that Lite Cylinder failed to report three cylinder failures in service and one cylinder failure during production testing... a DOT–SP 14562 cylinder ruptured and damaged a gas grill in New Jersey... an injury to an Independent Inspection Authority (IIA) employee during a low pressure test at Lite Cylinder's facility... a cylinder failure that injured several people in the Dominican Republic...

Basically, their propane cylinders were made in a deeply shoddy way and regularly came apart at the seams. The newer ones came apart even more often. it is considered bad when your containers of highly flammable gas fall apart.

The company tried to hide this by not sending mandatory accident reports to the feds, and the feds were Not Happy when they found out!

For more context, the numbers for 2011 and 2012 in the table are the failure rates the company reported when testing their cylinders at 441 psi instead of the required 480 psi. The report predicts that the failure rates would have been even higher if they were tested at the correct pressure. (Pre-2011, the requirement was 320 psi) They also failed to test the cylinders randomly, instead only testing the first ones off the line, among a bunch of other methodological failures.

They were told to not make shitty cylinders.

They did not stop making shitty cylinders.

They also tested shitty cylinders by selecting samples the wrong way and then using lower pressure than the mandated minimum.

They also sold shitty cylinders the agency hadn't even heard of.

"mistakes were made but our vision holds firm, we cherish everyone who ever gave us money and hope we can count on your support in our future regulation-evasion and shoddy-manufacture endeavors"