Firm fined after employee has leg amputated
Buchan Concrete Solutions handed £300,000 fine after worker loses a leg in fork-lift truck incident
A PRODUCER of concrete blocks has been fined £300,000 after an employee had to have a leg amputated.
Newcastle-under-Lyme Magistrates’ Court heard the 42-year-old man was working near a trailer on 30 June 2015 as large concrete blocks were being unloaded on to the outside yard area of Buchan Concrete Solutions Ltd’s Drakelow site in Burton-on-Trent.
The man was removing the wooden struts that the concrete blocks had been resting on while the blocks were unloaded by a fork-lift truck. As he did so, one of the blocks slipped off the fork-lift and fell on him.
He was taken to hospital for treatment to serious crush injuries to one of his legs, which was eventually amputated from the shin down.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found the unloading operation was not properly planned, the fork-lift truck’s weight capacity of five tonnes was not enough to be able to cope with the weight of the blocks, and the worker should not have been in the vicinity while the concrete blocks were being lifted.
Buchan Concrete Solutions Ltd (now in administration), who pleaded guilty to Regulation 8 of the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, received a £300,000 fine and were ordered to pay £10,092.42 in costs.
After the hearing HSE inspector Lindsay Bentley said: ‘The injured man suffered life-changing injuries. This incident was entirely avoidable, had the lifting operations been properly planned, appropriately supervised and carried out in a safe manner.’
