Personal injury is never a laughing matter, especially when someone pays the ultimate price – but for every fatal occurrence there’s one that’s miraculous, too.
On the sad and tragic side of the news is how poor Mark Nyland lost his life in a rather gruesome accident at work. Mr Nyland, who was a lorry driver, ended up pinned between his lorry and a heavy loading shovel driven by a Kenneth Miller, a colleague who worked at the Milton Landfill Site with him. The ironic part is that the area of the landfill that the accident occurred was supposed to be a ‘safe area,’ where it was prohibited to use large vehicles near pedestrians.
Mr Nyland’s surviving family is likely to go after Miller with a vengeance, especially since the man died so young. I wouldn’t want to be in that loading shovel driver’s shoes right now, though I do sympathise with Mr Nyland’s relatives; it’s a senseless, tragic death.
Luckily not all the news is so dour and depressing this week. In fact, the accident solicitors can take a holiday with this next incident: two bricklayers miraculously avoided serious injury after plummeting from the second storey of a collapsing building. The two workers – a son and his father that have requested their identities be kept confidential – had been contracted to work on the building as it was being renovated, but Clark Brothers, the construction firm in charge of the whole affair, neglected to run any sort of risk assessment on the building.
Well, it turns out the second floor of the building just wasn’t structurally sound enough to hold the weight of all those bricks, and it triggered a collapse that sent the pair of workers tumbling down. Somehow in all the tumult they managed to avoid anything more than just a few cuts and scrapes, which is absolutely miraculous considering that an entire bloody building came down around them, not to mention all those heavy bricks and masonry!
It’s nice to hear a news story involving a work accident that didn’t result in workers ending up in hospital. It’s so rare to have a ‘happy ending’ to a story like that, but that’s as happy as it can get: our heroes walk out without getting injured and live to fight another day. Of course, Clark Brothers had to pay a hefty fine to the Health and Safety Executive, but it sounds like they deserve that!