Adelaide company JD Finlay Electrical fined $300,000 after trapped worker suffocates in electrical pit

A tragic workplace death has led to a $300,000 fine for an Adelaide electrical company, which SafeWork SA said showed “genuine contrition and remorse” as it was sentenced in court last week.

JD Finlay Electrical was found to have breached safety laws after one of its workers became trapped in an electrical pit and suffocated in June 2022.

The worker had been tasked with pulling electrical cables through conduit pipes which ended in the pit, SafeWork SA said.

To do so, the worker had lain on the ground and leaned into the 1240mm pit, to which access was “partially obstructed” by an electrical distribution board above it.

“As he attempted to extricate himself from the pit, he was unable to do so.” SafeWork SA said.

The worker died at the scene of positional asphyxiation, which occurs when the position of the body blocks the airway so that breathing is restricted.

“A trained supervisor was not on site when the incident occurred,” SafeWork SA said.

Deputy President Judge Miles Crawley told the South Australian Employment Tribunal last Wednesday that the potential hazard involved with a worker leaning at least partially into the pit “should have been obvious”.

“That a worker may then slip into the pit headfirst was a foreseeable risk. With a pit being 1240mm deep, the potential for serious injury was real.”

“Of critical significance to my mind was sending a work crew to undertake a job in a non-standard workplace without prior risk assessment or accompanied by someone trained in risk assessment.”

The pit cover at the site of the fatality had not been removed to assess what lay beneath it, and adequate training and safety documents about the required task had not been provided.

Crawley said the worker who died was left to “identify and manage the risks for himself”.

He said that this reliance on workers without appropriate training to make their own risk assessments was a circumstance common to many cases.

JD Finlay Electrical was charged with a breach of section 32 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2012.

“The charges related to a failure to take adequate steps to identify the hazard created by the work environment and to provide adequate training and safety documents in the performance of the task required to be undertaken,” SafeWork SA said.

It noted that in Crawley’s sentencing remarks, it was recognised that “JD Finlay Electrical had shown genuine contrition and remorse and had addressed deficiencies in its systems since the fatality”.