Arm crushed in dangerous machine

Prosecutions and Claims |
24.01.2008

A steel-manufacturing firm has been fined £20,000 after an employee's arm was crushed in dangerous machinery which his employer had recently imported from Taiwan.

Darren Nelson had part of his arm amputated after the accident in December 2006 at Meridian Metal Trading's site in Dudley.

Nelson and a colleague were working on the 39-metre-long machine, which slits wide coils of steel into narrower coils. He was at the end of the line where the coils are banded.

As a finished coil was about to slide off its spindle, he noticed that a pair of tin snips were about to fall into a pit beneath the machine. He called a warning to his colleague, who reversed the spindle's support arm. As he went to catch the tin snips, his right arm was caught and crushed between the spindle and the support arm.

HSE inspector Edward Fryer told HSP that Meridian had failed to conduct a risk assessment of the machine. It was not CE marked and there was no declaration of conformity for it.

The machine had no function to stop the support arm moving at any intermediate point, nor was the arm controlled by the emergency stop button.

"The machine was considerably below the standard expected," confirmed Fryer. "It wasn't just a bit wrong, it was all wrong."

Meridian Metal Trading pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act. On 11 January at Wolverhampton Crown Court the company was fined £20,000 and ordered to pay costs of £5,824.

It cost Meridian an additional £250,000 to make the machine safe.