Fine for Siteweld
19/12/11: A building firm and its director have received fines after a crane overturned and crushed a man to death.
Richard Thornton was employed by Siteweld on a building site in Wavertree, where he was helping to construct a new warehouse floor when the crane toppled over.
HSE have prosecuted both Siteweld and their managing director, Ben Lee, for not planning the work properly or carrying it out safely.
Liverpool Court was told that the crane was being used to lift a 6 tonne steel column from a position almost 18 metres away, which was outside the machine’s weight capacity at that distance.
The HSE investigators discovered that the crane wasn’t properly maintained and its alarm was inaudible to those who were working close by. The crane’s override switches were faulty, including the one which prevented it from lifting overweight loads.
Mr. Lee who is from Preston was fined £8K and received a cost order for more than £18K after he pleaded guilty to breaching H&S legislation. Siteweld also pleaded guilty but only received a nominal fine of £50 as it is no longer trading.
Mr. Thornton’s widow has said that she cannot explain how much she misses him, we were together for more than 20 years and always did everything together, when he died, my life also stopped.
The crane’s operator and the hire firm who supplied it have also been prosecuted at an earlier hearing in Liverpool.
A spokesperson for HSE commented that Mr. Thornton’s death is tragic as it was simply as a result of safety
procedures being ignored. The crane just wasn’t able to lift a column of that weight from that distance.Had the crane been well maintained and the work correctly planned, Mr, Thornton never would have died, it is of the utmost importance that construction firms heed this case in order to prevent any similar accidents from occurring in the future.
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