Jorge Castillo-Riffo inquest: CFMEU boss Aaron Cartledge says there were three safer ways to do job

WORK being done by a man fatally crushed during construction of the Royal Adelaide Hospital could have been safely completed three different ways, a union boss says.

• FROM THE INQUEST:

• Jorge Castillo-Riffo was working in a confined space
• He raised concerns just minutes before his death

WORK being done by a man fatally crushed during construction of the Royal Adelaide Hospital could have been safely completed three different ways, a union boss says.

Aaron Cartledge, state secretary of the construction union, broke down as he told an inquest that Jorge Castillo-Riffo should not have been working on a scissor lift when he was killed at the site in 2014.

Jorge Castillo-Riffo was killed on the RAH building site in 2014.

“I was on site that day, and if I didn’t have to race off to another meeting I would have gone and seen how he worked and would have stopped it,” Mr Cartledge told the Coroner’s Court on Friday.

“This is just completely the wrong piece of equipment to use in this manner, absolutely.”

Mr Castillo-Riffo, 54, was doing “patching” work alone when he was crushed between the lift and the slab of the floor above, and later died of catastrophic brain injuries.

CFMEU state secretary Aaron Cartledge says there was three safer ways of doing the job Mr Castillo-Riffo was killed doing.

Mr Cartledge said there was risk in manoeuvring the machine into position and then carrying out work in the confined space, and suggested alternative ways to access the atrium where Mr Castillo-Riffo was working.

He said a piece of gyprock could have been removed to allow a crane to move a boom lift into the site, or the crane could have dropped scaffolding which could then have been erected up a wall.

The third option would have been to access the area using a “personnel box” — a working platform suspended from one of the eight cranes that covered the entire construction site.

Mr Cartledge said safety meeting minutes showed workers were concerned about doing their jobs alone, and he held concerns about the training requirements for employees using scissor lifts.

“It was seen to be a safe piece of equipment that didn’t take a lot of training to be in,” he said.

He said some workers had told him they had been trained for as little as 20 minutes before being allowed to use the device.

The inquest continues before State Coroner Mark Johns.