A wood recycling company has been fined £200,000 with costs of £34,000 for major safety failings after a worker was killed when he was struck by a loading vehicle in December 2008.
Raymond Thomas Burns, who worked as a load inspector for UK Wood Recycling Ltd at its site in Wilton, Redcar, was walking between a wood pile and a skip in the yard when he was hit and run over by a load shovel. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that no segregation measures were in place to separate vehicles and pedestrians working on the site. Workers were unprotected from the dangers of constantly moving vehicles - despite previous near misses and incidents where vehicles had collided.
UK Wood Recycling Ltd pleaded guilty to breaching the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations SI 1992/3004.
Speaking after the case, HSE Inspector Bruno Porter, said, "A conscientious and hard-working man has lost his life in this senseless way. There was simply an acceptance by UK Wood Recycling Ltd of the established working pattern. Solely relying on drivers or workers noticing each other is not adequate control. This was an entirely preventable death caused by the company failing to have a system to allow vehicles and pedestrians to move safely around each other. Ideally, this segregation is achieved by the vehicles and pedestrians having separate traffic routes. If they share a route or area then physical barriers should be used to keep them apart, or other means of preventing moving vehicles and people being in the same place at the same time".
He went on to say, "The waste industry has a very high injury rate, and most of the fatal and major injuries relate to transport issues. The risks of serious injury and, all too frequently, death, resulting from the failure to control the safe movement of vehicles and pedestrians are widely recognised".
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