Man killed after accident at Hartlepool waste facility

The incident occurred while staff working as contractors for Hartlepool council were shredding green waste at the council's waste transfer station in Burn Road.

The man, who is believed to be in his 50s, became trapped under the arm of hydraulic equipment on a shredding machine and had to be freed by two crews from Cleveland Fire Brigade.

” We would like to express our deepest sympathy to the deceased man's family and our thoughts are with them at this very sad time.“
– Dave Stubbs, Hartlepool council
The fire services administered first aid until the ambulance arrived and the man was taken to hospital with chest injuries. The man, who has not yet been named, later died in hospital.

The site was closed for around four hours while the Health and Safety Executive and local police investigated the incident. A full investigation is now being put together by the HSE, but a spokesperson for the police said that they would not be treating the incident as suspicious.

Dave Stubbs, head of Hartlepool council's environment services, said: “We would like to express our deepest sympathy to the deceased man's family and our thoughts are with them at this very sad time.

“We feel it would be inappropriate to speculate on exactly what happened until all investigation is complete,” he added.

The incident highlights the worrying health and safety record of the waste management and recycling industry. Between 2001 and 2004 the rate of fatal injuries in recycling and waste was almost 28 for every 100,000 employees – over ten times the national average, and almost six times worse than the construction industry.

Cumbria
In a separate incident on the same day as the Hartlepool accident, a worker at a wood recycling site in Cumbria suffered severe injuries while dealing with a discarded fuse grenade. The Cumbria Waste Recycling staff member was handling wooden boxes taken from the Ministry of Defence's Longtown munitions base.

Despite the boxes being labelled as “FFE” (free from explosives), one box is thought to have contained nine grenade fuses – a small explosives used to detonate the main explosive devices within grenades.

The 24-year old man was emptying one of several hundred boxes from the Longtown base when the fuse ignited. As a result he lost the middle finger on his right hand and suffered facial and eye injuries. Despite being rushed to Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary, doctors were unable to re-attach the finger.

Mike Bareham, managing director at Cumbria Waste Recycling, said: “Each box included a certificate signed by the armed forces to witness that it contained no risk to civilians, this appears to have failed. We have done a preliminary investigation internally, the Ministry of Defence were on site within the hour to start their own investigation and remove the boxes from the site.

“In future, if we take similar loads of waste wood from the Military, we will only be taking material that is pre-sorted by trained armed forces employees, ensuring that no human contact is needed with the material on site and this tragic incident is not allowed to be repeated,” he added.

The Ministry of Defence and the Health and Safety Executive are now carrying out a full investigation into the incident. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said that its own police force would be assisting the civilian police with its investigation.