Farming News - Teenage farm worker's death 'Entirely avoidable'
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Teenage farm worker's death 'Entirely avoidable'
A farming company in the Scottish Borders has been fined over the death of a teenage worker, a tragedy which health and safety inspectors said was “entirely avoidable”.
On Monday, Jedburgh Sheriff Court heard how Zach Dean Fox, 19, was working for Seamore Farming at their premises at Deanfoot farm in Hawick. Fox was killed while trying to clear a blockage in a grain bin on the farm during harvest in August 2014.
Bins have exit spaces at the bottom to allow the grain to escape onto a chain conveyor belt. The bins needed to be cleaned out before moving from one type of grain to another, which the court was told happened around four times a year. Blockages can occur in the exit holes at the bottom of the bins, and Mr Fox was trying to clear one such blockage whilst standing in the bin, which was part full, when he became trapped and suffocated under the weight of oilseed rape.
Though a partner in the farming firm tried to rescue the young man, a subsequent investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) into the incident found the system of work in place to clear blockages in the grain bin was “inherently and obviously unsafe.”
Seamore Farming, of Deanfoot Farm, Denholm, Hawick, was fined £45,000 for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act on Monday.
After sentencing HSE inspector Allison Aitken commented, “This was an entirely avoidable tragedy which resulted in the death of a young man”.
“The dangers associated with working within the confined space of grain silos and clearing blockages in grain silos are well known within the farming industry and well documented in HSE guidance.
“Farmers should ensure that they have a safe system of work in place for clearing blockages in grain silos which avoids the need for anyone to enter inside them. This can be easily achieved, where necessary, by making some minor modifications to working practices to enable the task to be completed safely from outside the grain silo”.
Farming has remained the UK’s least safe work sector for several years. Though the industry has mounted a number of campaigns aimed at improving the sector’s safety record, the latest figures released in July 2015 show that there has been no improvement in farm safety in the last five years, and the level of fatal accidents has increased since 2013.
Farming still accounts for over 20 percent of deaths in UK workplaces, though the sector employs less than 1 percent of the working population.