Building firm fined in fatal staircase collapse
A leading construction company has been fined €50,000 for negligence which led to a father of two being killed when a concrete staircase collapsed on him at a building site.
Thomas O’Neill, a 31-year-old construction worker from Lucan, died at the scene of the accident from crush injuries when three flights of stairs, weighing two tonnes each, collapsed due to a design flaw in the "anchors" or bolts holding the staircase to the walls of the building.
G&T Crampton Ltd, of Ballintaggart Road, Clonskeagh, the main site contractor, pleaded guilty through its solicitor, Mr Peter Mullen, to directing persons to work in the vicinity of the stair well in circumstances where it ought to have known that it was unsafe to do so at South Lotts Office Development, South Lotts Road, Ringsend on December 12, 2002.
Judge Katherine Delahunt at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court also heard that two other men suffered cuts and broken bones from which they had since recovered.
She imposed a €50,000 fine on G&T Crampton Ltd and said it was "human error" which had allowed workers to return to the building before safety concerns which had raised earlier had been properly investigated.
Mr Niall O’Donovan, an engineer who investigated the accident for the Health and Safety Authority, told Mr Shane Murphy SC, prosecuting, there were a number of subcontractors on the site along with G&T Crampton.
A subcontractor installing landings and stairs on the second floor heard a loud bang at noon on the day of the accident and shouted at workers on floors below him to get out of the staircase area.
Mr O’Donovan explained that the flights of stairs sat on landings which were supported by metal "angles" connected to the wall by "anchors" or bolts and an "angle" had dropped 12 to 15 millimetres as a result of a failure of a bolt.
The man who heard the bang could see there was a problem with bolts on the first floor and called the site foreman, a G&T Crampton employee, to investigate. The foreman told the workers to stay out of the stairwell and ordered flights of stairs down to the ground floor to be removed.
Scaffolding was then erected to investigate the problem on the first floor and the site manager was informed.
However, before the fault was fully appreciated and corrected, workers were allowed to re-enter the stairwell’s basement area in what defence counsel, Mr Patrick Gageby SC, described as "a judgement call which simply turned out to be wrong".
The remaining flights of stairs collapsed at around 4.30 pm, killing Mr O’Neill and injuring the two others who were employees of another subcontractor working on the site.
Mr O’Donovan said the collapse was caused by the failure of the supporting bolts which he said were "grossly under-designed and poorly detailed". He said G&T Crampton were aware of the failure of first floor bolts at noon and should not have allowed the men to work in the stairwell.
He agreed with Mr Gageby that the site manager and foreman had both believed the problem to be restricted to the first floor and would rarely have come across such "a design failure".
Judge Delahunt heard G&T Crampton had four previous District Court convictions for Health and Safety Act breaches in the past seven years. The company had also been awarded a safety certificate in a scheme operated by the Construction Industry Federation.
A director, Mr Colm McKenna, who expressed the company’s "deepest sympathy" to Mr O’Neill’s family said: "We regret the part we played in this tragedy."
He said health and safety was of "paramount importance" to the company and that since the "tragic accident" it no longer used the same method of construction in relation to staircases. He described the site manager and foreman as valuable and competent employees who were both "deeply traumatised" by the incident.
"The memory of what happened is still living with us all," he said.
Mr Gageby said the case was not one which was "the fruit of deliberate carelessness" but was rather "a call, badly made by two people".
