Browsing: Equipment and plant | Page 12

An employer has been fined $350,000 after a jury found it guilty of offences relating to a fatal instruction to work in the dark. Meanwhile, a utility company has been fined over a degloving incident, and two organisations have been charged after a child drowned.

A worker who alleged she wasn't provided with hearing protection in noisy areas in her 30 years with Qantas, has won her industrial deafness claim, with a commission rejecting the airline's intermittent-noise case.

Workplace exposure limits for diesel emissions are likely to be set under the national model WHS laws, with a major Safe Work Australia-commissioned report finding the prevention of diesel-related cancers and other diseases hinges on keeping exposure levels low.

A PCBU whose "deficient" work systems led to a transformer exploding, and causing serious oil burns to a nearby worker, has been handed a pre-discount penalty of $600,000.

WHS fines relating to a confined-space fatality have surpassed $1 million, after the sentencing of a PCBU over failures to enforce coherent plant isolation procedures and causing the death of a worker, as well as serious injuries to two others attempting to rescue him.

• Fatality charge coincides with industrial gate warning;
  
• Long-term WHS exemption expiring in NSW; and
  
• Comcare releases Q&A on new psychosocial regulations.

• Employers alerted on risk-eliminating controls after fatality; and
  
• Employer failing to ensure guarding was as difficult as possible to bypass charged.

A PCBU has been handed a pre-discount penalty of $300,000, after its "unexplained disregard" for guarding requirements led to the amputation of five of a teenage worker's fingers. Meanwhile, a repeat offender's latest safety fines have been increased significantly, after a regulator appealed.

An equipment hire company and its director have been handed record-shattering WHS fines totalling more than $1 million, after a worker was killed inside the "strike radius" of mobile plant. Meanwhile, a regulator has confirmed it is still prosecuting a business and an officer over another fatality, despite the withdrawal of an industrial manslaughter charge.

A WHS prosecutor has been given the green light to pursue a business that was charged with recklessly causing a patron's death, but is now in liquidation, with a court finding the case isn't blocked by corporations laws.