Court / Construction firm fined £860,000 over death of young man on Viking construction site
THE PRINCIPAL contractor on the Viking Energy wind farm construction has been fined £860,000 after the death of a 23-year-old working on the project in 2022.
Liam MacDonald, from Tain, died at the Viking construction site on 5 June 2022 while working for BAM Nuttall.
He was killed by the bale arm of a concrete skip, which crushed him while he was cleaning the inside of the skip.
At Lerwick Sheriff Court on Wednesday BAM Nuttall was fined £800,000, plus £60,000 victim surcharge, reduced from £1.2 million for the timing of the company’s plea.
The company previously pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 by not ensuring the health, safety and welfare of its employees was protected.
Sheriff Ian Cruickshank said he had to impose a fine which “sends a message that companies must do all within their power to ensure safe working practices”.
He said that was a duty not only for the managers of a major company like BAM Nuttall, but its shareholders too.
Solicitor Murdo MacLeod, acting for BAM Nuttall, told Inverness Sheriff Court they felt this was “very much a one-off” incident.
He said steps had been taken to ensure it could not happen again.
Sheriff Cruickshank said he had heard the incident was “not indicative of a cavalier attitude to health and safety”.
However, he said MacDonald had been sent to chip off hardened concrete from the inside of skip with a heavy hammer – which was “not a task that he had carried out before”.
“He was not accompanied to the skip, was unsupervised and was not provided with further instruction,” the sheriff said.
“I was told that the chipping of concrete with a hammer, when necessary, would ordinarily have been undertaken by a worker standing outside the skip.”
MacDonald was pinned by the skip’s bale arm, which weighed 80kg, and was found motionless by colleagues.
The arm was supposed to be secured by a carabiner and chain, but was not so in this case.
It is not known how it came to be unsecured.
Sheriff Cruickshank said BAM Nuttall was found to have no specific risk assessment which applied to this particular type of skip, and so the risk of serious injury from the bale arm falling had never been addressed.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) also found BAM Nuttall had failed to ensure there were appropriate control measures in place.
The risk of an unsecured bale arm falling on someone chipping dried concrete, working either in or outside the skip, was “assessed as being high”.
Despite the assertions from MacLeod that this was a one-off incident, Sheriff Cruickshank said BAM Nuttall had a “number of previous breaches” of the Health and Safety Act.
The company had 16 contraventions of the act between 1999 and 2024, he said, with “fines ranging from £3,500 to £2,334,000”.
Sheriff Cruickshank found that while BAM Nuttall’s culpability for the offence fell within the medium category for sentencing, the risk of harm caused was “high”.
“Whereas this was an isolated incident, the offence was the significant cause of the actual harm which occurred,” he said.
“There was, in all the circumstances, a high likelihood of harm arising and that is what transpired.”
He said BAM Nuttall had an operating profit of £52 million for the most recent financial year, and its turnover had exceeded £1 billion for the last three years.
And he said any financial penalty had to have a “real economic impact” which matched the size and profitability of the company.
Sheriff Cruickshank ordered BAM Nuttall to pay £800,000, plus a £60,000 victim surcharge, within eight weeks.
BAM Nuttall apologised for the circumstances leading to MacDonald’s death last week, and offered its “sincere condolences” to his family.
“We strive every day to ensure that all our staff work in a safe environment and we deeply regret that we failed Liam in June 2022,” it said.
“Safety is our priority and we are always reviewing our procedures and making continuous improvements.
“Immediately after Liam’s death we took steps to ensure that this incident would not be repeated, and we will continue to build on this learning going forward.
“We have made improvements to our processes, our safe systems of work and the equipment we use on all of our sites and reviewed our training to ensure that staff are aware of the risks involved in their work.
“We are committed to the health and safety of everyone who is impacted by our work, and we will continue to make that our prime consideration in everything that we do.”
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