Company prosecuted after young engineer dies

Gavin Bedford, 24, was helping to dismantle and demolish a section of industrial pipework at the Gerber Juice Company premises in Llantrisant on 16 June 2010 when the structure, weighing around 300kg, collapsed and struck him. The electro-mechanical engineer from Porthcawl, a well-known surfing and British trial-biking champion, sustained critical head injuries and died three days later in hospital. Gerber Juice, now trading as Refresco Gerber UK, was prosecuted after a joint investigation between the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and South Wales Police discovered the company had failed to adequately plan and resource the decommissioning work. Newport Crown Court heard that Gerber had closed their Llantrisant factory in 2010 and moved production to Bridgwater in Somerset. Mr Bedford was one of a small number of employees who had been temporarily kept-on to assist teams of specialist contractors in stripping the factory of its plant, machinery and services. During the decommissioning, the factory had become a construction site with Gerber electing to plan, manage and monitor the project themselves instead of appointing a competent Principal Contractor. As a consequence, Gerber had overlooked various hazardous tasks such as the removal of overhead industrial pipes and their supporting structures. This work consequently fell to the in-house engineers because they had not contracted the specialists to do it. The court was told that Mr Bedford's work had not been adequately planned, risk assessed, communicated or monitored by management, and that the various safety systems that Gerber used to manage its specialist contractors had not been used to manage its own engineering staff on the same site. The police and HSE investigation established that because no written plan was provided to the Gerber team explaining how the structure was to be taken apart, various bolts and structural elements were removed in an unsafe sequence. This is what led to the eventual collapse. Mr Bedford could have been lying injured for up to 40 minutes before he was found trapped unconscious under the pipes. The Court also heard that a production manager for the juice factory was in charge of the hazardous decommissioning project, despite never having done this work before or having received any formal training. Furthermore, a safety officer only visited once or twice a fortnight and was based in Somerset. Refresco Gerber UK, registered at Hans Road in London but based at Express Park, Bridgwater, Somerset, pleaded guilty to a breach of Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work &c. Act 1974. Nigel Bedford, Gavin's father, commented: "This type of work was obviously dangerous and Gerber should have looked after Gavin properly. There was no planning for the job and the area wasn't cordoned off. The management involved in the work didn't have a clue what was going on." Anna Bedford, Gavin's mother, added: "I am left heartbroken. Gavin was a perfect son. He was a perfect friend. It was as if Gavin was put on this Earth to do such wonderful things; to help anybody that needed him. He touched everyone he knew and he had thousands of friends. I am so proud to have been Gavin's mother. The world is a poorer place without him."