Skip hire firm fined £150,000 after worker loses his life

A Salisbury-based skip hire company has been fined £150,000 and ordered to pay £55,000 in prosecution costs after one worker tragically lost his life when a tyre he was fixing exploded.

Jozef Trhan, from Slovakia, died as a result of an accident that occurred on his 33rd birthday on 12th February 2008. He was employed by C Bialek Ltd (trading as CB Skips) to sort through skip rubbish but he had also become involved in repairing the tyres and wheels of the large industrial waste moving machinery used at the site. CB Skips had failed to check whether Mr Trhan had the appropriate training and experience for this task.

On the day of his death, Mr Trhan was welding together the sections of a split rim wheel before inflating the tyre. This was established practice for fixing split rims at CB Skips, despite the fact that it is an unsafe method.

Mr Trhan was knelt in front of the tyre when the welds suddenly failed and the inner-tube ruptured. This caused the tyre to explode and Mr Trhan was hit by the metal components and propelled into the air by the blast. He struck his head on a nearby excavator loading shovel and his injuries were so severe that he later died in hospital.

CB Skip Hire pleaded guilty at Salisbury Crown Court to breaching the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that the firm had provided dangerous and unsafe machinery and had failed to carry out a proper risk assessment for tyre repairs. They neglected to train their workers and did not provide supervision for employees carrying out repair work.

Commenting on the case, HSE Inspector Liam Osborne said: “CB Skips failed to protect Mr Trhan in a number of ways; essentially they didn’t know what was going on in their own yard.

“Workplaces using split-rim wheels need to appreciate that if these wheels are not in perfect conditions and people are not fully trained in their repair, their workers could be working near a bomb waiting to go off at any moment. It was pure chance that nobody else was near the wheel when it exploded as this incident could have easily led to more deaths and injuries.”

First Response Training are one of the UK’s leading health and safety training providers, delivering training to over 70,000 students per year across all industry types. They work with around 6,500 clients every year and continue to expand their client base and develop new and innovative training methods.

Business Development Director, Darren Emery, says: “People can’t continue to dismiss health and safety when cases such as this are so tragically frequent. There are still thousands of fatalities every year as a result of accidents in the workplace and a sensible, proportionate but dedicated approach to workplace health and safety is the only way to tackle this.

“Creating a health and safety culture within your business starts with training. We can offer a wide range of health and safety training courses, including Essentials of Health and Safety, Managing and Supervising Safety, Risk Assessment, Managing and Supervising Risk and Safety Representatives, plus many, many more. Please call us for more information.”