As one employer recently discovered, not properly protecting employees can land you in a heap of trouble.
Aeroplane manufacturer Airbus was recently fined following the death of an employee who was crushed between a tractor and a fertilizer spreader at the firm’s plant in Broughton, Great Britain.
The company was prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) after an investigation found Donny Williams and his co-workers had received no training on how to work on the equipment when the incident happened in November of 2011.
Mold Crown Court heard in July that the 62-year-old worked in the maintenance department, servicing the fleet of vehicles used by Airbus at the site. He was asked to fit a fertilizer spreader to the back of a tractor as part of a trial to spread granular de-icer onto the plant’s runway.
Williams asked a colleague to help him with this job by starting the tractor and pulling a lever in the tractor cab. As the other worker did this, he heard Williams shout and turned to see him trapped between the tractor’s rear tire and the spreader. Although his colleagues managed to release him, Williams died shortly after having been taken to hospital.
HSE’s investigation found that fitters in the department had received no training for driving, maintaining or attaching equipment to tractors and lacked understanding of tractor controls.
The company did not have a safe system for attaching equipment to tractors and no risk assessment for the job had been carried out by the company. In addition, none of the fitters knew of the existence of an operator’s manual for the tractor and none of them were familiar with the controls. Instead, they used a “trial and error” approach to find the right operations.
Incident was Preventable
The incident could have been avoided if the well-known “safe-stop” industry practice had been adopted by making sure the hand brake is fully applied, all controls and equipment are in neutral, the engine is stopped and the key is removed.
Airbus Operations Ltd of Aerospace Avenue, Filton, Bristol was fined nearly $342,000 and ordered to pay more than $100,000 in costs after pleading guilty to a breach of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
Author Kori Shafer-Stack, Editor, Amaxx Risk Solutions, Inc. is an expert in post-injury response procedures and part of the Amaxx team helping companies reduce their workers compensation costs by 20% to 50%. www.reduceyourworkerscomp.com. Contact: kstack@reduceyourworkerscomp.com.
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