Steel manufacturing company fined $150K after child crushed to death in factory
Posted November 13, 2018 3:28 pm.
Last Updated November 13, 2018 4:46 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A steel manufacturing company has been fined $150,000 after a child was killed at its Linwood, Ont., facility in July 2017.
J.M. Lahman Manufacturing Inc., pleaded guilty to violating the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) when one of its supervisors brought two children into its factory northwest of Kitchener, allowing one of them to wander the premises without supervision.
The OHSA prohibits people under the age of 15 from being in a factory without being accompanied by an adult.
The child who was left to wander the factory was crushed to death when bundles of steel tubing that were being stacked by a worker collapsed. The total weight of the stack was estimated to be about 14 tonnes, and the child was instantly killed.
The other child was not harmed.
“A Ministry of Labour engineer determined during the investigation that the use of softwood spacers between the bundles and the use of insufficient numbers of bands to hold the tubes together contributed to the collapse,” the Ministry of Labour said in a release. “There may have been other factors as well.”
The company was fined $100,000 for permitting a child inside the factory without supervision. An additional $50,000 was imposed for failing to properly secure the bundles of tubing.
