Norland Managed Services and Balfour Beatty fined for contractor's death

Two companies, Norland Managed Services and Balfour Beatty, have been fined a total of £380,000 by the British courts following the electrocution and death of a contractor.

The man in question, 27-year-old cable jointer Martin Walton, was working at the Morgan Stanley data center in London. He accidentally managed to come into contact with a 415V live terminal and died. This happened in 2010, while Walton was employed by Integrated Cable Services Ltd and contracted by Balfour Beatty.

The reason for the death was ruled as a management mistake. The work being carried out involved adding a new uninterruptible power supply to the data center. Norland Managed Services was the company in charge of the mechanical and electrical systems there, control that was handed to Balfour Beatty while the work was carried out.

The HSE, having assessed what caused the accident, found that no one involved understood fully what work was being carried out. This led to Mr Walton working next to a live cable without knowing it was live. This was not the fault of the contractor, but that of the two principal companies involved: Balfour Beatty and Norland.

The fine relates to breaching two sections of the Health and Safety Work Act. Balfour Beatty must pay £280,000 and Norland pays the other £100,000.

Datacenter Dynamics

The cost of not checking how good your contractor is

A recent court case highlights many of the issues raised with the recent revision of the CDM Regulations that came into force on April 6th.

One of the UK’s largest toy manufacturer and importer needed some gutters clearing on their 3,344 square metre asbestos cement roof. As a result of a recommendation by one of their employees, the company appointed the employee's father, an unemployed builder, and his mate to do the work. Unfortunately the mate fell nine metres through a plastic skylight and suffered fatal injuries.

Both the company and the builder were prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive. The company was fined £200,000 and the builder was given a six-month jail sentence suspended for a year by Preston Crown Court. The company admitted a single breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 by failing to ensure the workers safety and was also ordered to pay £10,483 towards prosecution costs.

Basically, the company did no checks at all on the competency of the builder they employed. They did not ask for, or see risk assessments, method statements, or any other paperwork and as a result they had no idea as to how the work was to be carried out. Bear in mind this is a multi-national company with bases in the UK, Hong Kong, and Germany and with a multi-million pound turnover. At the time of the incident the company had no full time health and safety manager, they do now!

Under the new CDM regulations the Client has much more responsibility and a situation like this should never arise, however, if a company of this size does no checks, what about all those thousands of smaller companies around the country?

When will major contractors recognise the superiority of the NDTG Demolition Supervisor card?

When will major contractors recognise the fact that the NDTG Demolition Supervisor card is superior to the SSSTS course and meets all of the SSSTS criteria?

This week has seen a number of emails into C&D asking us to clarify what is covered within the NDTG Demolition Supervisor card and does it meet the criteria of SSSTS. We have directed all of those enquiries to the NDTG website where the criteria for the NDTG Demolition Supervisor card are clearly shown, and that criteria is at a level above that of SSSTS.

There still seems to be confusion in the construction industry as to how demolition cards sit alongside SSSTS and SMSTS despite a great deal of work by NDTG to clearly explain the card system.

The demolition card scheme was around before the current myriad of construction cards in the CSCS scheme and was always seen as a benchmark of training in a specialised industry but now it seems that some principal contractors see a general SSSTS course as more beneficial to demolition supervisors than an industry specific course that not only meets the criteria of SSSTS but exceeds that criteria.

In demolition we are specialists and our training is delivered to cover both our specialism and industry guidelines so the Demolition Supervisor card was developed, and has continually evolved, to make sure that NDTG trained Demolition Supervisors are trained above and beyond the level of general construction supervisors.

The addition of the NDTG Demolition Manager course over the last few years now sees the demolition industry with a qualification that not only meets all the criteria of SMSTS but is a leader in the specialists field.

Demolition training is specific to our industry and covers our individual skill sets as well as the more general issues facing supervisors and managers today so we at C&D believe that anyone carrying out demolition in any capacity should be trained as NDTG guidelines and demolition specific training should be recognised as one of the top specialist training schemes around and something that all clients and principal contractors should demand on all projects. Anyone supervising demolition should hold the NDTG Demolition Supervisor card and NOT just SSSTS as our industry is specialist and as such requires specialist training.

We feel that principal contractors should not insist on SSSTS and SMSTS on demolition sites when the current NDTG card scheme exceeds those criteria. Lets see a change in the way demolition training is viewed and ensure that all demolition projects are supervised and managed by NDTG Demolition Supervisors and Demolition Managers and stop the insistence of some companies that only SSSTS and SMSTS qualifications are accepted as that imposes additional costs onto the demolition industry when we do not need it.

We would like to see a change in demolition training so that the specialist skills that we have are recognised and we are not forced to carry out additional and expensive training just to hold a particular type of card that is seen, incorrectly, by some to be superior to the NDTG card scheme.

SSSTS and SMSTS are both good courses but it is time that the construction industry recognised that they are general courses, whereas Demolition Supervisor and Demolition Manager are courses written for a particular specialist industry and as such are better courses to suit that specialism.

It is, in our opinion, wrong to impose restrictions on the type of training that will be accepted on some sites and we would like to see the construction industry recognise that demolition leads the way in training the workforce, the supervisors and the management in both the general skills required to carry out their duties, and the specialist skills that their job entails. Lets see training that reflects the role of the trainee, the hazards that they will face in their job and the way that their work is undertaken rather than a blanket, all embracing, supervisor or management course that deals very well with generalities but not with the specifics of the job.