Confusion in communication is a common cause of accidents. It seems to have played a central role in a serious incident on the coast of the Moray Firth, recently reported on the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) website. A worker suffered facial and hand injuries as a result of an accident in Wick Harbour in January 2013 Brian Reid (‘R’), who was employed by a subcontractor, was lowered into the hold of a ship in a man riding basket lifted by a crane. Wind turbine components were to be unloaded from the ship. R was removing sea fastenings to enable the unloading to take place. Hugh Simpson (Contractors) Limited (‘HSCL’) was in charge of the lifting operation. Neither the basket nor R could be seen by the crane operator whilst R was in the hold of the ship The employee of HSCL who was in charge of lifting operations on the day was on the deck of the ship to provide a communication link between R and the crane operator by means of hand signals. After R had removed one of the sea Continue Reading
Manual Handling Accidents
In rural California in the mid-1980s, Mike Yurosek had a problem which was common to all carrot farmers. More than half his crop was going to waste because it was considered too ‘ugly’ for retail. Carrots which were malformed, crooked or too large were written off as unsaleable and consigned to the bin. After some experimentation and some false-starts with different cutting implements, Yurosek settled on an industrial green-bean cutter, which cut the second-class carrots into regular 2-inch pieces. Unsure as to the reaction he would get, he sent a free bag of the alternative carrots with the usual delivery to one of his local retail clients. Next day, they called him to say that from then on they only wanted the new design of carrots. Yurosek had invented the ‘baby carrot’. In so doing, he lifted the carrot industry out of a rut. By 1987 – the year after his discovery – carrot consumption in the U.S. had risen by 30%. In the decade to 1997, carrot consumption doubled. Continue Reading
Supermarket Slipping Accidents
Growing up in the U.S. in the middle of last century, Irving Naxon’s mother told him stories of her own childhood in a small village in Lithuania. Every Friday afternoon, she took a pot of uncooked stew to the local bakery, where it was placed in the oven. While everyone observed the Jewish Sabbath on the Saturday, the dish simmered in the slowly cooling oven. By evening, it was cooked to perfection and ready to be collected and eaten by the family. Naxon was inspired by this story and, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, sought to develop a way of cooking which was both economical and environmentally friendly. His invention was the Naxon Beanery – a pot surrounded by a heating element which mimicked the cooking method from the Eastern European bakery. The ‘slow cooker’ was born. When Naxon retired in 1971, he sold his business. The new owners refined the cooker’s design and renamed it the Crock Pot. Today, crock pots are integral to American cooking: they’re low-effort, efficient and Continue Reading
Can You Get 100% Contributory Negligence?
As a chocolate lover, my taste is more for milk chocolate and white chocolate than for dark chocolate. If dark chocolate is married with another flavour, such as mint, I’m a big fan but, on its own, I’ll always prefer the other varieties of chocolate, if I can get them. With 100% dark chocolate, it means that all the ingredients have come from the cocoa bean. 100% dark chocolate is not to everyone’s taste because of its intense bitterness. In the world of personal injury claims, an area where ‘100%’ could leave an intensely bitter taste in your mouth is in relation to contributory negligence. What is contributory negligence? In the usual case, contributory negligence is where it’s accepted by the other party or their insurers that you should get some compensation for your losses. The catch is that they say it was partly due to your own fault that you got injured – so your full compensation should be reduced by a percentage to reflect your share of the blame. In Continue Reading