A firm has been fined £10,000 for breaching health and safety rules after a maintenance engineer’s hand was crushed at a Birmingham factory.
The 40-year-old worker from Stourbridge, who has asked to remain unnamed, was injured in the incident at ThyssenKrupp (Materials) UK Ltd’s Tyseley site in July last year.
Birmingham Magistrates Court heard how the worker was removing chocks from a bed of a plate at the time. The chocks were being used to hold up a pressure beam whilst maintenance work was being carried out.
However, as the chocks were removed, the beam fell onto the engineer’s hand.
He needed to take three months off work following the incident, but has since returned to work at the same company.
The Health and Safety Executive launched an investigation into the incident, finding that the company, a subsidiary of the ThyssenKrupp group, had not provided its workers with the sufficient information and instruction needed to carry out the task. In addition, workers had not been provided with the sufficient training needed to manage the site maintenance programme.
The firm, based Cradley Heath, admitted to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and was fined £10,000 alongside costs of £940.50.
HSE inspector Paul Cooper said after the hearing: “ThyssenKrupp Materials should have spent time working out a safe working methods for all maintenance tasks, especially those which were routine.
“There were no written risk assessments or safe systems of work in place.
“The company should also have made sure that the engineers were given the necessary training on the machines and the information they needed to operate them.
“Instead, they were given nothing and expected to learn as they went along.
“Since the incident the firm has brought in service engineers to do the most intricate maintenance work and arranged for those engineers to give the employees training on the machines.
“Had they done this before, a worker could have been spared a painful injury.”