No barriers. No excuses

A 60-year-old man fell nearly four metres through an unguarded opening at a construction site being developed by Roger Tippet Property Developments of Redruth, Cornwall.

The company was fined £8000 for breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) 1974 in not ensuring the safety of its employees. Additionally, it was fined £2000 for a breach of reg.6(1) of the Construction (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1996 in failing to provide barriers around an unguarded opening to stop falls from height.

The company pleaded guilty to both charges and was also ordered to pay a total of £927 in full HSE costs by Camborne magistrates last November.

The court was advised that on 12 February 2004 Garfield Douglas, a labourer employed by the construction company, had been working on the first floor of a two-storey development in west Cornwall, converting an old industrial mill into apartments. Materials were being stripped out and thrown through an open trap-door by a team of labourers.

“Inevitably, during the course of the work, Douglas stepped backwards through the unprotected trap-door, falling 3.7 metres and landing on the concrete floor below. He sustained eight broken ribs, a broken collarbone and life-threatening internal injuries,” said Jonathan Harris, the HSE inspector who investigated and prosecuted the case. Douglas has not been able to return to work.

Some rural workers have never been on a decent site. they don’t know what measures should be there

Jonathan Harris, HSE

Ignorance can kill

In mitigation the company said that it had since brought in a health and safety consultant to deal with its health and safety management.

However, Harris made the point that: “Health and safety regulations are there to protect people from their own actions. Especially in areas of high unemployment, such as Cornwall, people do what they are told. They don’t have the luxury of being able to say they are not prepared to work because they think a situation may be dangerous, and walk off to another job. In rural Cornwall, people have very often never worked on a decent site, so they don’t know what measures should be there to protect them. We would have expected as a minimum for there to be guardrails around the opening and, even better, a properly managed chute for disposing of materials.

“This was a large fine for Cornwall. Falls through internal openings account for more fatalities and major injuries than falls from roofs or scaffolding. In the year 2002-2003 there were 28 fatal accidents and 615 major accidents on construction sites to persons falling from two metres or more.”