When the age of the building presents additional challenges, but the risks still need to be managed
What happened?
This case happened at an old restaurant dating back to 1867. It had a wrought-iron, brass-railed staircase – an original 19th century feature. When the accident happened, in 2011, it was operated by Pizza Express in Soho, London.
The head chef asked a 28 year-old man and three other employees to carry a heavy cupboard weighing 168kg from the first floor to the second floor. As a grade-II listed building, the staircase was narrow, and the cupboard became stuck on one of the landings (a flatter area between two runs of stairs). While trying to free the unit, he fell backwards through a window and landed on the pavement five metres below.
He suffered serious spinal injuries and as a result is tetraplegic.
A criminal prosecution followed, when it was alleged that there was a failure to plan a manual handling task that resulted in life-changing injuries, and a suitable and sufficient risk assessment would have identified the risk of moving something so heavy on stairs, and avoided the need to move the cupboard.
Legal Outcome
Pizza Express (Restaurants) Ltd pleaded guilty to HSW S2, and was fined £200,000 and charged costs of £58,453 in 2015.
What can we learn from what happened?
This case illustrates that manual handling tasks, especially the kind of strenuous and complicated one covered here, must be planned and while planning, any foreseeable risks must be managed.
The context here is the building is very old, and the kind of narrow staircase was narrow and hard to navigate. The load was very heavy, and while having four employees to carry out the task may have made it easier, any team lifting introduces complications and can often increase the chances of something going wrong. Whether that was the case here is not known, but what is known is that the man went through a window, and this should have been foreseen.
The case was brought under HASAWA, but it was a Manual Handling risk that wasn’t thought through.
The window now has bars to prevent such an accident happening again.
Source of Information
Bridget Leathley – from her ‘The Safer Choice’ website