A Bolton recycling firm has been ordered to pay 3,500 in fines and costs after an employee was badly injured when he was struck by a steel beam weighing more than 100kg.
The 52-year-old from Horwich was standing next to a forklift truck in the yard at J Doyle Ltd on Gaskell Street on 18 July 2012 when the six-metre-long beam slid from the forks and fell onto his left leg.
The worker, who does not want to be named, sustained a fractured ankle, a deep cut to his shin, and bruising and swelling to his shin, ankle and foot. According to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), he was off work for more than three months and now walks with a limp.
J Doyle Ltd was prosecuted by the HSE on Friday (November 15) at Trafford Magistrates Court after an investigation found the company had failed to make sure the work to lift beams was planned, supervised or carried out saftely.
The Court heard another worker at the site had been trying to load the steel beam into an empty skip so it could be delivered to a customer. As he did this, it slid from the forks on the forklift truck injuring the delivery driver, HSE said.
The HSE investigation found the company had used this method of lifting steel beams on previous occasions, but had failed to plan the work properly.
J Doyle Ltd
J Doyle Ltd was fined 2,000 and ordered to pay prosecution costs of 1,500 after pleading guilty to breaching the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998.
‘The company deeply regrets the incident that happened in July 2012’
J Doyle Ltd spokesman
A spokesman for J Doyle Ltd told letsrecycle.com: The company deeply regrets the incident that happened in July 2012. It is an activity that we only did two or three times a year and while we had a risk assessment and safe systems in work in place for fork lift truck operations, it was found not to be specific enough for this particular activity.
He added that the company has now stopped this beam loading activity on its site.
The spokesman said: The fork lift driver was fully trained via an external training facility and the driver was a very experienced slinger of beams. The court accepted that the fork lift driver and HGV driver did not follow company safe systems of work or training instructions, which if they had done the incident would probably not have happened. The company is not aware that the driver has complications from the incident and has returned to work on full duties.
J Doyle Ltd runs skip hire and scrap metal services and also operates a materials recycling facility (MRF) at Westhoughton in Manchester.
HSE
Speaking after the hearing, HSE inspector Emily Osborne said: The injuries suffered by J Doyles employee are still affecting him today, more than a year after the incident, and have caused him a considerable amount of pain.
The firm should never have allowed a long steel beam, weighing over 100kg, to be lifted on a forklift truck in this dangerous way. The work was not planned and the risks ignored.
The company has now stopped using a forklift to lift steel beams and instead uses a HIAB crane on the back of a flatbed truck to deliver steel beams to customers. If they had lifted the beam using this equipment at the time of the incident then the employees injuries could have been avoided.
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