Browsing: Fatalities | Page 13

A local council has failed to avoid prosecution over the drowning deaths of a father and son by claiming it was wrongly charged under WHS legislation.

• Judge's WHS referral triggers government action; and
  
• Power tool causes four serious injuries in five weeks.

A major defence contractor has been convicted and fined $450,000 over a death, after a court heard it had been aware that workers were experiencing difficulties with what turned out to be the fatality-causing task.

A company that was fined heavily over the death of a teenager, in the notorious Macquarie Park, NSW scaffolding collapse, has been permanently banned from performing contract work, while its director has been disqualified for a decade.

• Employer fined $390k over fatality and site-preservation breaches; and
  
• Vehicle "blind spots" increased prior to workplace death.

In a long-running case, an engineering company has been convicted and fined $250,000 for failing to ensure two workers were actively supervised while they helped a crane perform decommissioning work at another company's site.

A PCBU has been handed a pre-discount fine of $540,000, following the death of a subcontracted site manager in a 19-metre fall, with a court finding it failed to enforce both its, and the subcontractor's, safe work method statements.

A major employer has been handed a pre-discount WHS fine of $800,000, after a worker was electrocuted just nine weeks after a similar incident that "should have been a significant wake-up call".

An employer that was effectively forced, by a judge's erroneous ruling on a fatality, to plead guilty to breaching regulations for high-risk work, has been fined $420,000 after a retrial, saving it $430,000 in penalties.

The workplace safety prosecutions of a company, a senior officer and three workers - relating to a death and a non-fatal incident - have been allowed to proceed, with a judge quashing an earlier decision to strike out the complaints for technical reasons, including that some were filed in the wrong court.