Firm fined £10k for health and safety breach after worker's hand crushed at factory
A company has been fined £10,000 for a breach of health and safety rules after a maintenance engineer's hand was crushed at a factory.
The 40-year-old worker from Stourbridge was injured at ThyssenKrupp (Materials) UK Ltd's site in Tyseley on July 9 last year.
Birmingham Magistrates Court was told he was removing chocks from a bed of a plate when it happened. The chocks had been used to hold up a pressure beam while maintenance work was carried out.
But as soon as they were removed, the beam fell on the engineer's hand.
He was off work for more than three months but has since returned to work at the company.
An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive revealed the company, a subsidiary of the ThyssenKrupp group, had failed to provide workers with adequate information, instruction and training or to appropriately manage the site maintenance programme.
The firm, based in Cox's Lane, Cradley Heath, admitted a breach of Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
It was fined £10,000 for the breach and ordered to pay costs of £940.50.
Speaking after the hearing, HSE inspector Paul Cooper said: "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."
No-one at the company was available for comment.
