A southern Adelaide electrical company has been fined $300,000 after a worker died when he became trapped in a pit.
JD Finlay Electrical was sentenced in the South Australian Employment Court on 20 November.
It is the second significant SafeWork SA prosecution in a week following the record $840,000 fine issued to Riverland manufacturing business JMA Engineering on 15 November.
JD Finlay Electrical was charged for a breach of section 32 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2012 following a SafeWork SA investigation.
The charges related to a failure to take adequate steps to identify the hazard created by the work environment and to provide adequate training and safety documents in the performance of the task required to be undertaken.
The worker was tasked with pulling electrical cables through conduit pipes which terminated within the pit on 1 June 2022.
To do so, he laid on the ground and leaned into the pit to pull electrical cables through conduit pipes.
As he attempted to extricate himself from the pit, he was unable to do so. The worker died at the scene of positional asphyxiation.
Work on the day of the incident involved a non-standard pit, access to which was partially obstructed by the presence of an electrical distribution board (EDB) above it.
The particular tasks to be undertaken had not been assessed by a supervisor, nor had any risk assessment for the job been undertaken prior to the workers attending the site.
A trained supervisor was not on site when the incident occurred, and the pit cover had not been removed to assess what lay beneath it.
In his sentencing remarks, Deputy President Judge Crawley said JD Finlay Electrical had shown genuine contrition and remorse and had addressed deficiencies in its systems since the fatality.
He said the failure to undertake an appropriate risk assessment and the reliance upon a worker without appropriate training to identify and manage the risks for himself was a circumstance common to many cases.
‘Of critical significance to my mind was sending a work crew to undertake a job in a non-standard workplace without prior risk assessment or accompanied by someone trained in risk assessment,’ Judge Crawley said.
‘That a worker may lean at least partially into the pit should have been obvious. That a worker may then slip into the pit headfirst was a foreseeable risk. With a pit being 1240mm deep, the potential for serious injury was real.’
Quotes attributable to SafeWork SA Executive Director Glenn Farrell
Tragedies like this serve to emphasise and justify the heavy onus placed on business owners to ensure work activities are appropriately assessed for all known and new hazards and the significant penalties to which they are liable if they fail to adequately control those hazards.
There was a clear failure to take adequate steps to identify the hazard created by the work environment in this instance, and to provide alternative means of undertaking the task without a worker needing to enter the pit in this manner.
Source: SafeWork SA
