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May/June 2023 issue

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Slips and trips
Sector: Financial/general services
News

*UPDATE* South West Water fined £1.8m after lone worker drowned

Open-access content Friday 5th May 2017
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

p1000356

Robert Geach, 54, had removed a 1.05 m x 41 cm observation grid on top of the sand filtration unit to access and inspect the waste-water filter underneath. After he had removed the grid to reagitate the air supply to the filter, Geach slipped and fell into the water below.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) identified that a colleague has last seen Geach standing on the filtration unit at around 3pm as he was leaving the site. Geach had logged on to the lone worker system at 2.39pm, with a two-hour poll time (the period of time before he had to send another status update). However, at 4.39pm Geach had failed to respond to the automatic system, which attempted to reach him again at 4.45pm and 4.50pm.

An alarm was automatically raised with South West Water's control room at 4.52pm. A technician then attempted to make contact with Geach, and also spoke to his wife who confirmed that he had not arrived home from work. Information obtained remotely from the tracker in Geach's work vehicle showed that it was still parked at the Falmouth site.

At 6.22pm South West Water contacted the stand-by catchment operator and asked him to go to the site to locate the missing operator. He found Geach at 7.30pm face-down in the water tank.

The accident happened on 30 December 2013, and HSE inspector Georgina Speake visited Falmouth WasteWater Treatment Works the following morning with Devon and Cornwall Police. She told IOSH Magazine that she identified an "obvious risk" posed by the removal of the observation grid, for which the risk assessment was inadequate.

The HSE served a prohibition notice and an improvement notice on the company, the latter of which required South West Water to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment.

Speake said: "The HSE recommended that South West Water introduce a safe system of work, ie guardrails, reduced-size grates, work restraints, dual manning etc., or relocate the sand filters to ensure that the risks associated with this maintenance activity were eliminated or reduced so far as was reasonably practicable."

It fixed the observation grids into position and installed a smaller "cat-flap" opening in them. This reduced the size of the openings while not restricting the operatives' access to the sand filters. Single-manning on sand filtration units at all of South West Water's wastewater treatment sites was also suspended.

The company halved the maximum three-hour poll time on its lone worker call system to 1.5 hours, before it eventually replaced the technology with a Twig system. The new system features a panic alert, an automatic "man down" tilt detector, and GPS tracking. The devices are also fitted with multiple SIM cards in order to pick up the strongest signal.

"Some areas of Cornwall have poor mobile phone coverage, however the new Twig system will connect to the best network available," Speake said, adding that any alarm triggered goes through to Securitas' alarm receiving centre in Milton Keynes and is dealt with independently of South West Water's control room.

South West Water had pleaded guilty to breaching s 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act at the earliest opportunity. Judge Linford, who handed the company a £1.8m fine at Truro Crown Court on 21 April, said the penalty "needed to have an impact". (See box below for the judge's application of the sentencing guidelines.)

Application of the sentencing guidelines

Culpability:

High

Seriousness of harm risked:

Level A

Likelihood of harm:

Medium

Harm category:

2

Significant cause of actual harm:

Yes

Size of the organisation:

Large

Turnover:

£504.4m

Starting point for fine:

£2.4m (judge moved outside the category range)

Mitigation:

Early guilty plea, lack of previous convictions

Penalty:

£1.8m plus £41,608 costs

You may also be interested in...

Image credit: ©iSstockphotos/kynny

 South West Water sentenced over catchment operator's drowning

Monday 24th April 2017
Robert Geach, 54, was working on the sand filtration unit at the Falmouth Waste Water Treatment Works on 30 December 2013, Truro Crown Court was told, when he slipped and fell into the tank.South West Water dispatched a colleague to the site four and a half hours later, in response to its lone worker alert system. He found Geach floating face-down in the water.
Open-access content
Image credit: ©Jeff Blackler/REX/Shutterstock

 Co-op prosecuted over pensioner’s fatal convenience store slip

Wednesday 24th May 2017
Truro Crown Court was told that water had been intermittently leaking from a sandwich chiller over a 44-hour period in July 2015. Although staff had mopped up the water, they had not taken any action to stop or contain the leak, nor to prevent customers walking into the area. Engineers had been called to the store the day before the accident happened and were thought to have successfully repaired the chiller. However, water continued to seep out and staff had placed a wet floor sign next to the leak but had failed to report it as a maintenance issue.
Open-access content
Image credit: ©iStock/arcoss

 Telecoms co endangered engineer’s life at Edinburgh roadworks

Monday 10th April 2017
On 27 February a fibre optic engineer was filmed working in a manhole on a busy 48 km/h road in Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. The dash-cam video shows cars swerving around the man, who was employed by contractor KNNS and whose only safeguard was two traffic cones.  The Scottish road works commissioner Angus Carmichael fined CityFibre on 4 April after he concluded that the incident “could have resulted in a fatality” and demonstrated the company’s “lack of compliance with roadworks legislation”.
Open-access content

 Quarter of a million pound penalty for roof void fall

Friday 5th May 2017
 The 49-year-old also sustained a fractured spleen and ribs in the 3.5 m fall. Bristol Magistrates’ Court was told that the victim had been contracted by Solarjen - formerly Paul O’Brien Solar Installations (SW) - to carry out work at Fairlawn School in Montpelier. However, the firm had not erected guardrails to prevent its employees falling through voids in the roof. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) also said it had failed to appropriately supervise the task.
Open-access content
©iStock/shotbydave

 HSA hopes farm inspection campaign will reduce accidents

Wednesday 3rd May 2017
To date in 2017, four of the six farm-related deaths have involved tractors or machinery, the HSA has reported. As part of the month-long campaign, inspectors will be encouraging farmers to plan work and have systems in place that minimise risk, particularly during silage harvesting. Pat Griffin, senior HSA inspector, said that many serious and fatal accidents on farms occur when someone is crushed or struck by machinery.
Open-access content
©iStock/Sean824

 Absence rates stable in UK manufacturing

Tuesday 2nd May 2017
Employees took an average 5.2 days off sick in 2016, compared with 5.3 days the previous year. This is the equivalent to 2.3% of working time, which remained unchanged from the previous year and continues a theme of stability in the absence statistics since 2010, the sickness absence benchmark report says. Though the number of days lost to absence declined for both manual and non-manual workers, manual workers had higher rates of sick leave – an average of 6.1 days compared with 3.1 days for those in white-collar jobs.
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