Industry news roundup: week ended 15 Dec 2014:
The Health and Safety Executive positively threw the book at a construction firm recently after one of its workers sustained some serious injuries on the job.
49 year old Jamie North, a groundworker from Grimsby, ended up breaking his leg in multiple places as he undertook piling work for Topcon Construction Ltd. The poor bastard went through the ringer, needing not one but two surgical operations to piece his leg back together which required screws and a steel frame. To make matters work, he ended up being diagnosed with a blood clot after a three week hospital stay. Needless to say he’s no longer working in construction and is still undergoing treatments to strengthen his ankle. The personal injury claim is going to be bloody massive – you know it as well as I do.
Meanwhile, Topcon was just found guilty of breaching safety regulations after the HSE prosecuted the firm. The construction company now has to pay some £10,000, as well as personal injury compensation, for the massive debilitating accident, and all because Topcon couldn’t be arsed to make sure that the work equipment being used for cropping piles was in suitable condition.
Honestly I’m not going to go into what exactly hapened to Mr. North. Needless to say it involved a pile that hadn’t been cut right because the equipment used to cut them free, a cropper, didn’t cut through it completely. A worker pushed a pile over and it twisted and fell right on the poor groundworker. And that’s really all I’m going to say about that, considering how gruesome the man’s injuries were.
Meanwhile the whole thing could have been prevented according to the HSE. But no, now Mr North is half-crippled from his experiences and injured so badly that he’ll never work in construction again. Not that firms think that much about the wellbeing of their workers if they don’t have to. This is of course why the HSE fines these companies so deeply – because the only language these bastards speak sometimes is cost and benefit. If we can make it more expensive for firms to not comply with HSE rules than it is to actually take care of their workers properly, maybe we won’t have these ridiculous instances in the future, eh?