November 3rd, 2009
A welder from Liverpool has won £140,000 in compensation after he contracted terminal cancer from working with asbestos.
Ronnie Cadwallader, 76, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in November 2007 after spending part of his working life stripping asbestos lagging off pipes, turbines and boilers.
His wife Ann told the Livepool Daily Post: "Ronnie was so fit and healthy, always running and never smoked or drank. All of a sudden he was really poorly with no energy.
"It was horrific."
His two-year struggle for compensation was made more complex by the fact that the two firms he had carried out such work for were no longer in business.
But Mr Cadwallader has finally been offered compensation by insurance firm Zurich, which was the insurer for one of his former employers, Carolina Engineering.
The Health and Safety Executive has recently launched a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of working with asbestos aimed at tradesman and maintenance workers.
Tags: Asbestos Compensation, Boilers, Cadwallader, Health And Safety, Health And Safety Executive, Insurance, Insurance Firm, Insurer, Liverpool, Maintenance Workers, Mesothelioma, Pipes, Stripping, Struggle, Terminal Cancer, Tradesman, Turbines, Wife Ann, Zurich
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November 11th, 2008
Two companies have been prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive after an employee was killed in an accident.
The unnamed worker had been walking along a steel structure with platforms and walkways at various heights where boilers were being installed in July 2005.
However, floor gratings that were moved during the installations had not been replaced and the man fell 23 metres to his death.
Lentjes UK, the principal contractor and Rafako S.A., the sub-contractor, were prosecuted for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Work at Height Regulations 2005 respectively.
HSE inspector Peter Collingwood said that had the gratings been replaced or had the fitters not been permitted to remove them, the worker’s death would not have occurred.
"Another life has been lost because of the inability to plan and implement simple and basic precautions and employers need to understand that this is simply not acceptable," he remarked.
Under the Work at Height Regulations 2005, every employer should make sure that work is not carried out at height when it can be successfully carried out at ground level.
Where work at height is carried out, employers are legally obliged to take adequate steps to prevent falls.
Tags: Adequate Steps, Boilers, Breaches, Floor Gratings, Health And Safety, Health And Safety At Work, Health And Safety At Work Act, Health And Safety At Work Act 1974, Health And Safety Executive, Lost, Peter Collingwood, Platforms, Principal Contractor, Prosecution, Rafako, Safety At Work, Steel Structure, Walkways
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