IOSH magazine spoke to HSE inspector Natalie Pomfret about how fungus caused a tree on a Bupa care home’s land to fall, crushing an eight-year-old girl and leading to her leg being amputated.
On 8 July 2021, an eight-year-old girl was out for an evening jog with her father when they passed Oak Lodge Care Home, run by Bupa Care Homes (CFHCare) Limited, in Bitterne, Southampton. As the girl and her dad ran on the pavement past the entrance to the care home, a lime tree on the property fell, crushing the young girl and leading to catastrophic injuries which eventually resulted in her having her leg amputated at the hip. Bupa Care Homes was subsequently fined £400,000.
We spoke to health and safety inspector Natalie Pomfret about how this accident could have been avoided with suitable tree management, and what IOSH members can learn to keep their workplaces safe.
The incident
'The accident involved an eight-year-old girl and her father. They were out jogging in the evening in their local area, following a route they often took that went past Oak Lodge Care Home,' said Natalie.
'There was a lime tree that stood just at the entrance to the care home and, as they ran past, this tree fell across the pavement and into the road. The father was running slightly in front of the child and, when the tree fell, very sadly, it hit her and trapped her underneath it.
'At HSE, we received confirmation of the accident through RIDDOR soon after it happened, and we also learned that the girl’s crush injuries were too severe to save her leg. An HSE inspector from the local office went to the scene of the accident the day after and commissioned an external arboriculture expert so that we could look at the tree from a technical perspective.'
The investigation
'This was a multi-faceted inspection in the sense that we were looking at Bupa itself – looking at the company’s policies and procedures and risk assessments, and finding out about how it was managing trees on its own premises. We also looked at the aspects of the training on site and we interviewed the on-site gardener to find out what experience he had,' Natalie said.
'We also looked at the work done by an arboriculture contractor that Bupa had commissioned for reactive work, such as storm damage – we discovered that the last time that kind of work had been done on the tree that fell was a number of years ago. And we also liaised with the local council and its tree officers because the tree had a tree preservation order on it, so we found out about the history of the tree as well.'
Next: Newcastle City Council fined £280k for failing to remove rotten willow tree that crushed six-year-old school girl
The findings
'The arboriculture expert was commissioned to write a technical report of the condition of the tree and how that might have contributed or not contributed to the accident. It was found that the tree had a common disease called brittle cinder fungus – it’s a fairly well-known disease in lime trees. The expert felt this had been rotting the tree for a number of years and, had it been noticed, it would have been seen as quite likely that the tree would fall, given the level of damage,' Natalie said.
'During our investigation we found that Bupa didn’t have a suitable risk assessment for tree management at the care home. That’s quite significant in terms of how it would have then put in controls to deal with the risk. While Bupa had an on-site gardener, we would have expected him to have a working knowledge and understanding of common diseases and defects in trees. Unfortunately, he didn’t have that level of knowledge and he hadn’t been trained either, so he didn’t recognise that the tree was rotten, even though he did visual inspections as part of his job.
'The biggest thing was that we found Bupa didn’t have a proactive strategy for tree management. That would be a proactive system set up for monitoring and inspecting trees so that decay and damage are found in advance and work can be commissioned to correct those problems, rather than work being done after the event. This is something that is considered reasonably practical for people managing trees on their land.'
The prosecution
At West Hampshire Magistrates' Court, Bupa Care Homes pleaded guilty to a breach of section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act and received a fine of £400,000. The company was also ordered to pay costs of £3,275 and a victim surcharge.
'The most important thing Bupa should have had in place was that tree management strategy. That has a number of elements to it, the most crucial of which is being proactive – having periodic inspections of the site by someone with a working knowledge,' Natalie said.
'Bupa needed to have a suitable risk assessment and, in this particular incident, that was especially important because it went beyond just the employees on site but could and, in this case, did also affect members of the public, not least people visiting residents of the care home or anybody on the grounds.
'One thing that is quite interesting in this case is that Bupa had started that process a few months before the accident. The company had started talking to its contractor about having some proactive work done, but unfortunately it hadn’t gone far enough through the process by the time the accident happened and nobody had looked at the site yet.'
Lessons for IOSH members
'When we say having a suitable risk assessment in cases like this, we don’t mean necessarily having risk assessments of every individual tree on the site,' said Natalie.
'In the case of tree management strategies, sometimes that can involve looking at a group of trees or an area and thinking about it in terms of zones: are the trees in an area where people will walk by often? Are they near a road or a pavement? Of course, there will be times when it is important to look at individual trees if there is a specific concern, but that is not always necessary.
'There are key factors when it comes to trees and tree management, and HSE provides some very helpful guidance in a Sector Information Minute about this topic.
'This document describes what would be reasonably practicable in terms of controlling the risks posed by trees. This involves a lot of the things that we’ve mentioned here: proactive management strategy, risk assessment and zoning, the type of experience the person inspection the tree should have, for example. That might be very useful for IOSH members to refer to if they are thinking about these sorts of concern.'
