JD Finlay Electrical fined $300,000 after worker gets trapped in pit at Walkerville and dies

An Adelaide electrical company has been fined $300,000 after a worker became trapped in a pit and suffocated to death.

An electrical company was fined $300,000 after a worker died in horrific circumstances by getting trapped in a pit and suffocating.

JD Finlay Electrical was sentenced in the South Australian Employment Court last week after a SafeWork SA investigation found they had breached the Work Health and Safety Act over the incident on June 1, 2022.

It is the second significant SafeWork SA prosecution in a week following the record $840,000 fine issued to Riverland manufacturing business JMA Engineering on November 15.

The company was charged over its reckless failure to protect boilermaker trainee Jake Fuss, 27, who died after a more than three tonne stainless steel tank toppled on him from a gantry crane in February 2021.

On the day of this incident, the 39-year-old worker was laying on the ground and pulling electrical cables through conduit pipes within the pit at a Walkerville building site.

As he attempted to extricate himself from the pit, he was unable to do so.

Emergency services at the scene of the workplace accident in Walkerville in June 2022. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

JD Finlay Electrical was fined $300,000 for breaching the Work Health and Safety Act. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

The worker died at the scene of positional asphyxiation – which occurs when the position of a person’s body interferes with their ability to breath.

The Lonsdale company’s charges related to a failure to take adequate steps to identify the hazard and to provide adequate training and safety documents for the task.

The investigation revealed that the work on the day of the incident involved a non-standard pit and access to it was partially obstructed by an electrical distribution board above it.

The particular tasks had not been assessed by a supervisor and risk assessment for the job been not been undertaken prior to the workers attending the site.

A trained supervisor was not on site when the incident occurred, and the pit cover had not been removed to assess what lay beneath it.

During sentencing, Deputy President Judge Crawley said JD Finlay Electrical had shown genuine remorse and had addressed deficiencies in its systems since the fatality.

He said the failure to undertake an appropriate risk assessment and the reliance upon a worker without appropriate training to identify and manage the risks for himself was common in these cases.

“That a worker may lean at least partially into the pit should have been obvious. That a worker may then slip into the pit headfirst was a foreseeable risk,” Judge Crawley said.

“With a pit being 1240mm deep, the potential for serious injury was real.”

SafeWork SA Executive Director Glenn Farrell said tragedies like this serve to emphasise the heavy onus placed on business owners to ensure work activities are appropriately assessed for all hazards and the significant penalties if they fail to adequately control them.

Originally published as JD Finlay Electrical fined $300,000 after worker gets trapped in pit at Walkerville and dies