Councilman wants anti-theft locks on shopping carts ADVERTISING Councilman wants anti-theft locks on shopping carts HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu officials are set to consider a proposal aimed at reducing the number of shopping carts that end up littered along city
Councilman wants anti-theft locks on shopping carts
HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu officials are set to consider a proposal aimed at reducing the number of shopping carts that end up littered along city streets and highways.
Honolulu Councilman Trevor Ozawa is proposing that retailers be required to install electronic wheel locks on their shopping carts. He also wants the carts to display a store’s name, address and phone number. The City Council will hear the measure today.
Ozawa’s bill, which also fines merchants that don’t comply with the rules up to $2,000 a day, has received criticism from opponents who say retailers should not have to face such penalties.
“They don’t believe that they should be victimized and penalized because they are the victims of property theft,” said Lauren Zirbel, executive director at Hawaii Food Industry Association of Hawaii. “We really feel it’s an unnecessary cost that will be passed on the price of food, and we don’t think that that’s acceptable,” she said.
But others say the proposal will help mitigate the city’s shopping cart problem.
“We wouldn’t have of these shopping carts all over the place,” said resident Margarita Emilyon.
Ozawa’s proposal comes after state Rep. Tom Brower came under fire three years ago for smashing the tires of abandoned shopping carts with a sledgehammer.
Fire department calls lab explosion an accident
HONOLULU (AP) — A visiting researcher who lost an arm last month in a laboratory explosion at the University of Hawaii told fire investigators the blast occurred after she turned off a digital pressure gauge she was using to check the pressure in a gas cylinder.
A report released by the Honolulu Fire Department on Monday said the researcher told investigators she didn’t hear gas leaking before the explosion. Photos in the report showed torn pieces of a metal gas cylinder sitting on a floor strewn with debris.
Compressed hydrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen detonated inside an air tank in the laboratory, fire investigators said in their report. Fire investigators concluded the blast was an accident.
The school has hired the University of California Center for Laboratory Safety to investigate. School spokesman Dan Meisenzahl said more details about the explosion would become known when this probe is completed, which he said was expected by the end of the month.
Fire investigators say the body of the gauge is missing, but Meisenzahl said the school knows the make and model of the gauge. He said it’s not a question of whether this particular gauge was faulty but whether the gauge was being appropriately used.
The researcher told fire investigators a small internal explosion occurred earlier in the same week when she conducted a similar experiment using a smaller air tank assembly nearly identical to the one that failed. This experiment also used similar components, the fire department’s report said.
Fire Battalion Chief Terry Seelig said that explosion was not reported to the university.
The researcher told investigators she would get shocked on occasion when touching the tank. She reported this to the professor who hired her to conduct research into bioplastics and biofuels, but he told her not to worry about it.
Meisenzahl said it’s not clear whether the static shock events were related to the explosion, but they are part of the overall investigation.
The laboratory is part of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute on the school’s flagship Manoa campus.
The university has said the explosion occurred when the researcher was growing cells by feeding them a mixture of low-pressure hydrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen.
