One helmet manufacturing firm worker suffered catastrophic personal injury when his arm was trapped within a hydraulic press, experts say.
James McKay, forty seven years of age, had been working at Helmet Integration Systems Ltd, operating a machine on the night shift used to make fire helmets shortly before the personal injury at work occurred. The machinery, which functions by joining two halves made from fibreglass, uses the application of heat to fuse them together.
Mr McKay, who was working alone at the time, had fitted the press with two separate halves of a helmet, but noticed that the bottom half had become loose from its position just as the upper half was descending into place. To remedy the situation, the worker opened the safety gates on the machine, assuming that doing so would prevent the press from operating, and slipped both of his arms within the machinery in order to make adjustments to the lower helmet mould.
However, the top half of the press continued to descend, trapping Mr McKay’s arms between both moulds and causing not just severe burns but extensive crush injuries. Personal injury compensation experts say that the injured man has had several surgical procedures in order to repair the damage, but one of his arms needed to be amputated after it developed an infection.
The Government’s Health and Safety Executive investigated incident, making the discovery that there were inherent design flaws in the hydraulic press that the man had been working on at the time of the incident. The press, provided and designed by Composite Integration Ltd, was designed in such a way that, even if the emergency stop button was depressed or when the safety guard was lifted, the upper cavity would continue to fall.
