A North-East England recycling company has been fined £2.15 Million after an agency worker was killed by loading shovel. The HSE investigation into the incident found that there were no suitable traffic management arrangements in place, meaning pedestrians were at risk of being struck by moving vehicles, including loading shovels. Loading shovels are particularly dangerous if adequate segregation is not in place, in part due to the limitations to the operator’s visibility around the machine.

An NHS Trust has been fined £480,000 after an employee suffered a brain injury after he was found unconscious in a manhole.  A Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation found that the Trust had failed to identify the manhole as a confined space, and thereafter, failed to properly risk assess the activity. The trust failed to prevent entry of employees into confined spaces at the site – which was custom and practice for a number of years. The trust also failed to identify a safe system of work or method statement for clearing blocked drains and no precautions were identified to reduce the risk of injury. The investigation also highlighted that no confined space training had been given to members of the estates team and insufficient information and instruction was provided to those involved as to the methods to be adopted, the risks involved and the precautions to be taken, when clearing drains and entering deep drains or manholes.

An offshore drilling company has been fined £130,000 after a crane boom collapsed catastrophically.  Nobody was hurt in the incident but the collapse resulted in flying debris damaging a nearby vessel and a cloud of cement dust. HSE’s investigation found that the immediate cause of the crane’s collapse was that no one had checked that a limit switch, designed to prevent the crane boom being raised to the point of mechanical failure, had been correctly set. The investigation also found that safety mechanisms, designed to prevent inadvertent operation of controls, had all been overridden to prevent them returning to their locked neutral position. An Inspector commented “As with so many incidents, the circumstances leading to the collapse of the crane were years in the making and symptomatic of a defective safety management system which allowed those conditions to exist and persist. This was quite simply an accident waiting to happen.”