Lawford Kidd's Blog

An Essex packaging company has been fined after one of its employees sustained a serious hand injury on an unguarded laminating machine.

Gary Dean had the skin on the palm of his left hand torn away in the incident on 26th September 2011.

He was using a glue laminating machine when he noticed an indent mark on a finished product. He put his left hand into the machine via an unguarded portal to scrape away dried glue residue from a roller that had caused the blemish, but his whole hand was drawn into the roller and the palm of his left hand was de-gloved.

New official statistics have shown that the number of workers fatally injured in Britain last year remains largely unchanged.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has released provisional data for April 2011 to March 2012, which shows 173 workers were killed - down two from the previous year.

The rate of fatal injury remains the same at 0.6 per 100,000 workers.

A worker from County Durham had his hand severed while carrying out maintenance on glass cutting machinery a court heard.

The 34-year-old maintenance technician was investigating a fault on a new tilt table with a colleague. He  was on his hands and knees while trying to ascertain the cause of the fault and had activated the emergency stop.

Suspended above his right wrist was a large laminated glass sheet measuring six metres by three metres and weighing around almost a ton. The worker had his right arm extended with a mirror in his hand so he could check the status of a sensor relating to the release of the glass onto the table.

A waste management and recycling company has been fined for safety failings after a worker lost most of his arm on an unguarded conveyor system at a Kent quarry.

Dartford Magistrates heard that a conveyor belt used to transfer waste into a sorting shed was juddering and virbrating, making sorting difficult, after a driving roller was blocked by stones.

Agency employee Vladislavs Golovacs should have stopped the machine before removing the debris. Instead he removed the stones with the power still running and his left arm became trapped and was torn with extreme force.

A farm company in Northern Ireland (NI) has been fined a record £187,500, plus £13,000 costs for health and safety failings that led to the death of 45-year-old employee Robert Wilson.

The company is the first in Northern Ireland to be convicted under new Corporate Manslaughter legislation. Under this legislation, companies and organisations can be found guilty as a result of serious management failures resulting in a gross breach of a duty of care.

Mr Wilson, who was working at the meal-mixing plant on the farm, was killed after being struck by a metal bin which fell off a forklift. The forklift was being driven by one of the company directors. The investigation revealed that the bin had not been attached or integrated with the forklift. It was also revealed that it was not possible to insert the lifting forks into the sleeves of the bin as the forks were too large and incorrectly spaced.