Court case for Chevron Australia Downstream Fuels delayed until 2023

A company has been accused of failing to protect customers after a man was crushed in a Springvale car wash.

Court proceedings in the case of a company charged over the death of an elderly man crushed in a car wash have been further delayed.

Chevron Australia Downstream Fuels Pty Ltd appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Monday for the first day of a committal hearing.

Multiple witnesses were at the court expecting to be cross-examined but the case was ultimately adjourned when the defence claimed it had not been given adequate time to prepare arguments contesting amendments to two of the four charges brought by WorkSafe.

They also raised issues accessing some of the files tendered in evidence.

Magistrate Carolyn Burnside adjourned the case until Wednesday, but when the parties reappeared a decision was made to adjourn the case again when it came to light that the defence had not been provided with some 200 documents.

The company is charged over an incident which occurred at a service station it operated on Springvale Road in 2019.

On November 25 that year a customer, aged 73, purchased a ticket from the Springvale station to wash his car.

The prosecution has alleged the man obtained the access code for the car wash and drove his car up to it before entering it into the keypad and driving under the gantry.

But when the car wash did not start he emerged from his car and returned to the keypad, where he attempted to re-enter the code.

However, it is alleged that he became trapped “between the door and chassis of the car” when the cycle started as he returned to his car.

Court documents, seen by the Herald Sun, state the man was “screaming and unable to move”, with sales assistants rushing to the man and unsuccessfully attempting to free him.

Paramedics arrived to find the man unconscious several minutes later, and his heart had stopped.

Paramedics were unable to free him so called a fire crew who arrived about 16 minutes later, the documents state.

The still unconscious man was taken to hospital where he later died from a lack of oxygen to the brain.

The prosecution case alleges Chevron failed to ensure people using the car wash were not exposed to risk.

It alleges there were no signs instructing customers not to leave their cars while the car wash was operating and that there was no engineering control system in place between the moving parts and obstacles in the bay (people, cars or other objects), which would stop it if it hit something.

The court heard the car wash had been manufactured in Europe, where customers are not able to remain in their cars while they are being washed.

The company is also charged with failing to remove brackets and not installing boom gates which would grant access to the wash bay only after a code was entered.

Parties agreed to return to court for the committal, set to span four days, next April.