Dittisham Recycling Centre Ltd, which is based at Lapthorne Cross near Dartmouth, was ordered to pay a £50,000 fine and prosecution costs totalling £25,000 at Plymouth Crown Court last week (June 12), after having pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work (1974) Act at an earlier hearing.
The court was told that the victim, Ben Sewell, 30, from Dartmouth, was found lying on his back on a bank, a few metres behind the overturned vehicle, on a sloping dirt track at Dittisham Recycling Centre on 21 September 2012. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
A prosecution was brought forward by the HSE after an investigation into the incident appeared to show that Mr Sewell had not been properly trained by his employer to use the vehicle. The company had also failed to properly enforce the wearing of seat belts fitted to the vehicles used by Mr Sewell and other staff, the HSE said.
Following its investigation, the HSE claimed to have uncovered a “catalogue of dangers” at the Dittisham Recycling site and served a total of eight Prohibition Notices on the company preventing its use of various plant and machinery until adequate safety measures were taken.
Incident
The court was told that on the day of the incident Mr Sewell was using the vehicle to take loads of oversized material from one part of the centre to another. The extensive site sits in a steeply sided valley. At one point he stopped at the top of the site to deal with a customer before setting off in his empty dumper down to the bottom of the site along the main dirt track.
The customer noted the truck was going at speed and that Mr Sewell was not wearing the seat belt. Minutes later, a colleague at the bottom of the site noticed smoke rising from a section of the dirt track above where he was working and he could just see the overturned dumper. He rushed to the scene and found Mr Sewell lying on his back at the side of the track some ten metres from the dumper truck. Paramedics later confirmed he had been fatally injured.
HSE found a series of safety failings with other vehicles, a tracked excavator and with processing machinery for rock crushing and screening. Tipping operations were also unsafe and some of the roadways about the site were inadequately protected. Inspectors issued two Improvement Notices requiring safety changes to the site’s roadways and tipping safety measures.
‘Preventable’
After the case, HSE inspector David Cory said: “Ben’s death was entirely preventable. The lack of competent training, poor monitoring and inadequate supervision of staff added up to a fatal combination. Although there were no witnesses, his injuries were consistent with being thrown from the truck.
“Dumper trucks are inherently unstable and dangerous machines to operate and the company had not enforced the necessary rules to make sure they were driven safely, including the full and proper use of the seat lap belts. Just under a third of all fatalities in the waste sector over the last five years have involved vehicles.
“If a vehicle has a roll over bar fitted to it the driver will also always need to use the seat belt – the safety place in an overturn is securely in the driver’s seat, protected by the roll over bar and seat belt. Many people think they can jump clear but this is wrong. Roll-overs just happen too fast and they get injured or killed by the vehicle as the try to jump clear.”
When contacted by letsrecyle.com a spokesman for Dittisham Recycling Centre Ltd said that the company had undertaken measures to ensure that employees wear seatbelts at all times.
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