Motor fall pinned engineer

Prosecutions and Claims |
15.09.2007

A south coast bus operator is set to pay almost £38,000 in fines and costs after one of its employees was crushed when an engine he was repairing toppled off a trolley.

Engineer Richard Gander suffered broken ribs and damage to his right lung and heart muscle when the engine fell on top of him on 17 August 2005.
Gander worked for Eastbourne Buses and was trying to fix the faulty "power pack" (engine and gearbox assembly), which he had helped remove from a bus and mounted on a low-level wheeled trolley.

Two fitters decoupled the gearbox from the engine and took it away to work on it separately. Gander then lay down under the engine to replace a hose that had previously been removed and, as he got up, the trolley tipped up and the engine fell on him, pinning him to the floor. He spent six weeks in hospital, three of them in intensive care, and is still signed off work with breathing problems almost two years later.

HSE inspector Andrew Christian told HSW that separating the two parts of the power pack had unbalanced the load on the trolley.

"If you take the large lump of a gearbox off one end, you are obviously going to change the centre of gravity," said Christian. "It's likely that Mr Gander, having replaced the hose, added his weight just to pull himself up. And if you add another 80 kilos to one end, it was enough to cause it to overbalance."

Hove Crown Court heard that the company had no risk assessment for splitting the power pack and that though 61-year-old Gander was an experienced engineer, he had received no training on the type of
engine he was working on that day.

The company had on file a recommendation from a health and safety consultant two years previously noting a lack of thorough risk assessments at the site.

"The crux of this is that even on one-off jobs you need documented risk assessments to identify the safe systems of work and make people aware of them," said Christian.

Eastbourne Buses pleaded guilty to a single charge under Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act of failing to protect Gander. On 18 July, recorder Susan Evans fined the company £25,000 and ordered it to pay £12,725 costs. Gander is also bringing a case against the firm in the civil courts.