Leeds Crown Court heard on Wednesday (7 January) that Wayne Potts, 39, died from his injuries hours after a one-tonne silo of varnish slid from the tines of a forklift truck and toppled onto him on 25 March 2011.
The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) prosecuted the Normanton, West Yorkshire-based company, which manufactures inks, varnishes and coatings, after it highlighted that the firm failed to spot the risks associated with carrying out the task.
The firm was also ordered to pay £50,000 in costs after it admitted breaching the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.
The court heard a customer had returned part of an order as it couldn’t decant varnish from a silo and had asked for the liquid to be sent again in 10kg plastic containers.
Workers were tasked with decanting the varnish directly from the silo. Potts had been decanting varnish from a tap at the base of the silo, which had been raised on the tines of the forklift, into 10kg plastic containers when it slid down the tines and fell directly onto him. He died in hospital later the same night.
The HSE found a combination of the heavy load, the downward tilt of the forks, and the valve being used frequently from below had caused the silo to fall.
It said the business had failed to assess the risks to workers of the decanting operation and, as a result, employees were operating without a system of work in place to help them do the job safely.
The court also heard it had been dangerous for the forklift to be used to balance heavy loads for extended periods as this was a job it was not designed for.
The HSE said the company’s failures to provide a safe working environment had exposed employees to serious risk and led to Potts’ death.
A report on the case in the Yorkshire Evening Post said that prosecutor James McKeon had said that employees Stephen Beecher and Michael Jackson reported a silo falling from the tines of a fork lift truck earlier in the same year. Nobody was injured in that incident, which had been reported to the company’s management.
The HSE said this incident should have alerted the company to future risks.
HSE inspector Phil Burgess said: “A system that involves a person standing in the immediate vicinity of a suspended load on a forklift truck, which had no driver, is inherently unsafe.
“The forklift is not capable of holding elevated loads for long periods yet it was a system that had been allowed to develop over time, despite there being readily available, safe alternatives.”
“Every worker should quite rightly expect that they will return home safely from work every day. Sadly this did not happen for Wayne Potts that day but there is no doubt that his death was avoidable had Gardiner Colours effectively managed the health, safety and welfare of its employees and learned lessons from previous incidents and near-misses.”
