After he suffered severe injuries in a fall from height, one employee of a building firm may bring an accident claim against his employer.
According to personal injury claims experts, David Tourish, aged thirty eight, had been working on a new house construction for the Walker Group Ltd when he tumbled from an unguarded flight of stairs. Severely bruising his kidneys in the fall, Mr Tourish also broke two of his ribs, which kept him from returning to work for three months; even after his return, the injured man required further physiotherapy to complete his recovery, and he may be considering a personal injury compensation claim against the home building company.
In the wake of the incident, the Government’s Health and Safety Executive conducted an investigation that found workers had been granted access to the construction’s upper level through the construction of a temporary flight of steps. Throughout the initial days of the construction project, this staircase had been protected by a guardrail, but the rail had been removed by a joiner employed on the building project to allow plasterboard to be fitted to an adjacent wall.
The guardrail was not replaced after the plasterboard was in place, which left the three metre drop exposed. This led to Mr Tourish’s injuries, and the HSE prosecuted the Walker Group Ltd for breaching Work at Height Regulations.
The building company admitted to breaching the regulations and was given a fine of £8,000 for their role in the incident. In the aftermath of the court hearing, one inspector for the HSE remarked that if the company had only protected the staircase properly throughout the entirety of the build, the entire incident could have been avoided quite easily.