Deadly silo collapse could have been predicted

Prosecutions and Claims |
15.09.2007

The death of a worker during the collapse of a disused mill building has cost a demolition firm £50,000.

Describing the accident as "entirely foreseeable", HSE inspector Murray Provan said Central Demolition had failed to carry out a proper survey of the structural hazards at the former Caledonia Mill in Edinburgh. Instead, the firm started to pull the building down "without full knowledge of the facts".

Machine operator Gideon Irvine was crushed to death on 22 August 2004 when a section of the box-shaped 36m-high silo building collapsed as he was using a hammer attachment on his 35-tonne excavator to break down the building's concrete supporting columns.

Provan told HSW that Central Demolition had failed to recognise that the building, which consisted of 17 grain silo sections, was not one continuous building but two separate ones, constructed around six years apart.

"To the untrained eye they looked identical," he said. The first eight sections to be demolished were the newer part, with the remaining nine forming the older building. As Irvine broke down the supporting column of the last-but-one section of the new building, the next section could not support the weight and peeled away.

Central Demolition's involvement at the site went back several years, said Provan, which meant it had "ample opportunity" to find out what it needed to know. Instead, it relied entirely on drawings prepared around 1989, making no effort to search archives or make reasonable enquiries.

"To demolish a building, you are deliberately making it unstable, so you need to make sure that when you employ machinery, it won't fall prematurely. The job has to be planned and all the features known," he said.

The company failed both to comply with health and safety legislation and to follow the British Standard for demolition. With this type of very tall structure, it should also have sought advice from a competent structural engineer, who would have been able to spot the differences between the two buildings very quickly.

"His advice would have been crucial in preventing the collapse of the last section of the new building which abutted directly onto the older part of the building," said Provan.

Central Demolition admitted a single charge under Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act for failing to protect the safety of its employees. On 24 August at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, sheriff Liddell fined the company £50,000.