Warrenpoint Harbour Authority has been fined £80,000 at Newry Crown Court after 58-year-old employee Kevin McGeough was fatally struck and run over by a 20-tonne Volvo loading shovel at Berth 1 in July 2019. McGeough had been power washing in the dockyard close to the travel route of two large loading shovels transferring wood chip 150 metres across the berth, with one machine carrying about 2 tonnes in a 1.69-metre-high bucket at the time. Investigators found no clearly identified, segregated or physically protected pedestrian routes, exposing workers to uncontrolled vehicle movements.

Rising water levels in Kenya’s Lake Naivasha have submerged large parts of Kihoto estate, displacing about 7,000 people and forcing the use of tourist boats for evacuation as access roads and ground floors are inundated. Local officials report that the lake has been rising for more than a decade, with recent levels overtopping informal embankments and flooding masonry houses, pit latrines and septic systems. Geotechnical concerns now centre on saturated foundations, slope instability on reclaimed lakebed plots, and contamination risks from submerged sanitation infrastructure.

Mount Semeru in East Java has been raised to the highest alert level after entering a new phase of intense activity, with ash columns reported above several kilometres and villages blanketed in thick deposits. Authorities have ordered mass evacuations from settlements on the volcano’s flanks and along key river valleys that previously channelled lahars in the 2021 eruption. For geotechnical and civil teams, priority issues are ash loading on lightweight roofs, rapid assessment of slope stability on ash-covered road embankments, and lahar risk to bridges and culverts.