Steel truss hits worker, causing critical injury
Ontario employer Gary D. Robinson Contracting Ltd. was fined $55,000 after one of its workers was injured in the workplace.
Following a guilty plea in Provincial Offences Court, St. Thomas, the employer was also tasked to pay a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.
The incident happened on Nov. 14, 2022, when workers were using a hydraulic tracked excavator to load open web steel trusses onto a lowboy trailer.
They were using a chain attached to the bucket of the excavator to rig the trusses to the bucket.
One of the workers was then responsible for chaining and un-chaining the trusses between each lift.
The workers were staking the trusses on the trailer in two parallel piles that stretched nearly the length of the deck of the 53-foot trailer.
A worker was walking along a stack of trusses on the trailer to unchain the most recently lifted truss when they felt the truss underneath their feet shift and jumped off the trailer.
A truss then slid and fell off the trailer striking the worker and causing a critical injury.
An investigation by the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development found that the trusses involved in the incident were wet, not secured on the trailer and were stacked metal-on-metal without any dunnage placed in between each truss to prevent slipping.
“Gary D. Robinson Contracting Ltd. failed to ensure that steel trusses were transported, placed or stored in a manner that would not tip, collapse or fall, as required by section 45(b)(i) of Regulation 851, a violation of section 25(1)(c) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act,” said the Ontario government.
