Firm fined £170k after worker was crushed by drum

ABIRMINGHAM company has been fined £170,000 after a warehouseman was crushed by a one-and-a-half tonne cable drum.

Jeffrey Smith, 56, feared he was going to die when the reel passed over him and only narrowly missed his head.

He suffered broken ribs and a collapsed lung in the accident while working for Anixter Ltd at its Saltley factory.

He was kept in hospital for eight days, five of which he spent in intensive care.

The company admitted breaching health and safety regulations and was fined £170,000 and ordered to pay £27,000 costs.

Birmingham Crown Court heard the accident, which was captured on CCTV, took place on December 7 in 2015 in the cutting shop of the Saltley warehouse.

Mr Smith, a longstanding employee, had been cutting a “significant” amount of cable from a large reel and then transferring it to a smaller one.

The smaller drum was then put on a set of weighing scales and he then had to move it off the scales and onto a ramp. He was unable to push it but could not fit behind it and so pulled it, said Adam Farrer, prosecuting.

However, as he was doing this his right foot got stuck, he lost his balance and fell backwards.

The drum then continued down the ramp and Mr Smith sustained crush injuries to his left side, including a number of fractured ribs and a haematoma.

The court heard that he was also lucky that he had been between the two flanges on the drum which had passed over him like the wheels of a car.

Mr Farrer said there was a gap which Mr Smith’s head had passed through otherwise “the outcome could have been very different.”

He said the warehouseman also temporarily lost his sight as a result of what happened and had made a reasonable if not full recovery.

Mr Farrer said this unsafe system of working had gone on for about seven years and that Anixter should have had a system which avoided manual handling of this sort completely.

He said it was “an accident waiting to happen.”

In passing sentence Judge Roderick Henderson said Mr Smith had been given a “substantial weight to manipulate” and that the CCTV was “frightening to watch”.

Dominic Kay, defending, said the company, which had 20 different sites around the UK and employed 540 people, had been unaware of the practice being carried out by their employee and if they had he would have been retrained.

He said it was an isolated incident and that Anixter took its health and safety training responsibly.