Two construction firms have been fined a total of £38,000 after a 600kg panel of glass fell on a lorry driver, breaking his pelvis.
At City of London Magistrates’ Court on 8 September, Isle of Dogs-based sub-contractor Scheldebouw was fined £20,000 and ordered to pay full costs of £10,000, while west London-based principal contractor, Brookfield Construction, was told to pay a fine of £18,000, with full costs of £9962.
Both firms pleaded guilty to breaching s3(1) of HSWA by failing to ensure the safety of non-employees.
The court heard that the incident happened on 16 March 2006 at a building site in Kensington, where Scheldebouw had been removing glass panels from a roof and placing them on scaffold stillages, before they were transported off site.
John Rooney had been standing on the back of his lorry, waiting for a stillage to be lowered on to it.
According to Lisa Chappell, the HSE inspector who investigated the case, there appeared to be only one strap holding three panes of glass to the A-framed stillage. Another lorry owned by a different contractor had been parked next to the kerb adjacent to Mr Rooney’s lorry, on to which the stillage containing three glass panels was lowered.
In an effort to help out, Mr Rooney climbed on to the other lorry, but one of the glass panels fell on to him, because it was not properly restrained. To exacerbate the situation, the road the lorries were parked on had a significant camber, which meant the bed of the lorry transporting the glass was not completely level.
Inspector Chappell told SHP that a sister company to Scheldebouw had devised a system for individually banding pieces of glass to a stillage, after experiencing an almost identical incident, but Scheldebouw had not used this system.
Both companies said in mitigation they had not intended to put profit before safety. Scheldebouw said it had conducted a risk assessment and method statement that Brookfield had looked over, but the inspector countered: “Although several areas needing improvement had been identified, none was made, and the work was carried out anyway.”
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