A Gisborne company has been fined $420,000 and ordered to pay reparations after the preventable death of a worker who became entangled in an industrial waste shredder.
47-year-old Maurice Dooling died while working at transport and recycling facility M E Jukes and Son Limited in April 2022.
The company was found guilty in December last year and was sentenced in the Gisborne District Court, where Judge Warren Cathcart found a simple safety measure could have saved Dooling’s life.
The court heard the company should have installed a perimeter guard with an interlocked gate around the shredder — a system that would automatically shut the machine down if the gate was opened.
Cathcart said the safeguard would have cost less than $20,000.
“The non-installation of the relatively low-cost engineering step… constituted a serious and elementary breach,” he said.
The court also ordered the company to pay $140,000 in reparations.
WorkSafe central regional manager Nigel Formosa said the court found the company had failed Dooling.
"Maurice Dooling did nothing wrong, and the court found that the company failed him.
"The law places the primary duty of care on the business to manage risk. That means putting systems in place that protect people regardless of what is happening around them," Formosa said.
He said businesses could not rely on procedures and training alone to keep workers safe around dangerous machinery.
"In this case, the court found that automatically stopping the machine when a worker got too close was a straightforward, affordable fix. There was no good reason not to do it."
Formosa urged businesses operating industrial machinery to review their own sites and ensure workers could not access dangerous moving parts while machines were operating.
"If your machinery can still run while workers can reach dangerous parts, that needs to change."
M E Jukes and Son Limited was charged under sections 36(1)(a) and 48 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 for failing to ensure, so far as was reasonably practicable, the health and safety of its workers.
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