A North Yorkshire farming company has been ordered to pay out over £18,000 after a worker sustained severe injuries following a three metre fall from a 360-excavator vehicle.
Leeds Magistrates’ Court heard that the 31-year-old farm worker had been carrying out maintenance work on the gable end of a barn on the farm.
He was working from a non-integrated work platform or ‘man-cage’ attached to the boom of a 360-excavator vehicle.
But the man-cage fell from the boom of the excavator, causing him to fall three metres. He received a fractured sternum, six broken ribs, a fractured bone in his back and three broken teeth.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the man-cage was used with the excavator because the partnership, W Gibson & Son, thought it had better reach and manoeuvrability to undertake the job of fixing the gable ends to the facias of the shed.
W Gibson & Son of Mayville Farm, Scarborough, North Yorkshire pleaded guilty to breaching Section 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work etc Act 1974. The company was fined £18,000 and ordered to pay £787.87 in costs.
After the hearing, HSE inspector Chris Tilley explained that excavators should not be used 'under any circumstances for lifting people'.
"They are primarily designed for excavating with a bucket and consequently are capable of operating speeds and movements which make them totally unsuitable for lifting people."
Mr Tilley added that non-integrated work platforms should not be used for pre-planned activities such as periodic maintenance.
“This incident could so easily have been avoided by properly assessing the risk and employing suitable work at height equipment, such as the use of scaffolding or an integrated work platform, including Mobile Elevated Work Platforms (MEWPs)," he said.
The HSE recently called for more to be done to improve farm safety in the UK following a string of accidents and incidents.
It comes just four weeks after Farm Safety Week, when the safety watchdog issued its 2021 report highlighting the high fatality rate in the farming industry.
Agriculture has the worst rate of fatal injuries of all the major industrial sectors, around 20 times higher than the average five-year annual rate across all industries.
