05/10/2015
Staffordshire animal processing company, John Pointon and Sons, have been ordered to pay £660,000 and substantial costs after a welder died working on an industrial oven.
The worker, who was self-employed, was fixing an oven on the company’s premises. The oven he was repairing shared faculties with another oven adjacent to it. Both ovens shared a collection vessel for the processed waste. That vessel exhausted the waste air into two oxidisers. Superheated steam from the functional oven entered the mutually shared collection vessel and passed into the oven the welder was repairing. He was subsequently scalded and died in hospital the following day.
Health and Safety Risk Assessment Failures
In the investigation that followed the workers death, it was found that no one in the company had undertaken any studies as to how the equipment operated and therefore, no adequate risk assessment has been undertaken. Instead, the company had relied on a generic risk assessment written to cover boiler operation for the safe system of work for entering the oven.
Previous Health and Safety Breach
In 2007, John Pointon and Sons was fined £620,000 after a worker died when he fell into a pit of animal waste while trying to rescue a colleague who had slipped into a machine rendering animal carcasses.
When sentencing the Judge said the company's attitude to a health and safety structure was "flimsy and ineffective" and its failure to respond to earlier incidents was an "aggravating feature" to the tragedy.
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