An independent school near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, has been prosecuted after an employee fell from the loft of the swimming pool changing rooms to the ground below.
The incident occurred when swimming pool attendant Stacey Paine, 19, was retrieving paperwork stored in a loft above the Kimbolton School changing rooms. To reach the documents, she walked along a beam of the unboarded loft but lost her footing. She fell two and a half metres onto the the tiled floor below, narrowly missing a benched area. She suffered a fractured wrist in the fall on 20 April 2010.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) prosecuting told Huntingdon Magistrates' Court that Kimbolton School had not carried out a risk assessment for entering the loft and failed to ensure that its staff did not work on or near a fragile surface.
The school admitted breaching the Work at Height Regulations SI 2005/735 and was fined £6,000 and ordered to pay costs of £2,276.40.
After the hearing, HSE Inspector Stephen Faulkner said, "The outcome of this incident could have been very different. Falling from height, particularly onto such a hard surface often results in severe injuries or even death. It is an employer's duty to ensure the safety of all staff and anyone working at height needs to be protected. In this case, the documents could have been stored somewhere easier to reach and if a simple risk assessment had been carried out, this would have been identified. I urge any organisation to consider where they store items including paperwork and how safe it is for an employee to access."
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