From experience - Falls from height
- Employee working on a box trailer vehicle fell 4m from the top of an
extension ladder sustaining multiple fractures to his hip and left wrist.
The ladder was neither footed nor secured and he lost his balance when
the bottom of the ladder slipped away. His employer had not carried out
a risk assessment and there was no safety equipment provided for work
on the tops of commercial vehicles.
- An employee had gone onto a storage area above an office. Permanent
access and guardrails were in place, but on the day of the accident the
barrier that normally prevented persons going onto a non-load bearing
part of the office roof was missing. When someone in the office below
called out to the employee, he stepped onto the fragile section of the
roof and fell to the floor below. He sustained two cracked ribs. Management
was not aware that the barrier had been removed and there was no warning
of the danger.
- 17 year old apprentice was clearing the gutters on the workshop roof
when he fell through a fragile roof-light onto the concrete floor 5m below.
He fractured his pelvis in three places. For convenience, his employer
had always used unsupervised and untrained apprentices to carry out this
work. There was no Risk Assessment no appropriate safety equipment available.
- An employee was assisting a driver position a vehicle over an inspection
pit. He was walking backwards when he fell about 1.5m into the pit sustaining
three broken ribs and a broken left wrist. Both the driver and the other
employee had ignored management’s safety procedures published in
the company’s induction pack which warned of the danger of reversing
in this way.
