Halifax company in court after employee’s arm is crushed
Posted: March 4, 2013
Posted in: Arm Injury Employer Negligence Workplace Injuries
A Halifax firm that makes shop fitting equipment has been prosecuted after one of its employees had his arm crushed when it was drawn into an unguarded machine.
The 35-year-old man from Siddal suffered extensive damage to his right arm in the workplace incident. He will never regain full use of his arm and has been unable to work since.
Magistrates were told that in the week before the incident there had been a problem with chains coming off the machine’s rollers and maintenance engineers had been called out to replace them.
When the problem recurred, the worker again called maintenance and then set the machine running and looked through a slot at the front. He thought he saw some tape on the rollers that would damage the board that was passed between them. He leant in to try to remove it but his arm was drawn from fingers to shoulder through the 15 cm gap between the top and bottom rollers.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found the company had failed to provide suitable guarding for the machine to prevent workers from accessing dangerous moving parts.
HSE statistics for 2010/11 show there were 25 fatal injuries and more than 17,000 injuries in the manufacturing industries.
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