Tata Steel fined £180,000 after molten metal incident
EMBATTLED steel giant Tata has been fined £180,000 after an employee at its Rotherham operations was showered in scalding molten metal.
In another blow to Tata, which announced 1,200 job cuts last month, the Health and Safety Executive has announced that is has prosecuted the firm after an unnamed operative suffered life-threatening injuries after a massive furnace blast in 2012.
A control system fault caused 22.6 tonnes of molten metal to spill from a furnace, and the employee and a colleague began cooling it down with hose water – on impact with the molten steel, there was a “huge” explosion and the worker covered in the liquid metal.
Colleagues applied a burn shield before he was taken to hospital, and two other employees received minor injuries.
He was in an induced coma for three weeks, and needed multiple skin grafts and reconstructive surgery to his eyes, ears and forehead.
The employee, who had worked at the firm and its predecessor since 1979, has returned to work but cannot work in high-temperature areas.
The Health and Safety Executive investigated the incident and found that although a temporary fix of control systems had been attempted, safety features had been removed prior to the incident, with workers having believed the issues were fixed.
Emergency measures to stop the molten metal discharging had failed, and the HSE found that Tata had no procedures in place to deal with molten metal spillages, and it had become normal practice for workers to hose water onto spills – which causes explosion if the water penetrates the surface.
Tata Steel UK, was fined a total of £180,000 and ordered to pay £82,979.26 in costs after pleading guilty to two breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
HSE inspector Denise Fotheringham said: “The company’s business is to make steel, but they had no procedures for dealing with these spillages, leading to employees using hoses to cool the metal. This was very dangerous but the scale of risk had not been recognised by workers, who had received no other information or instruction on what to do.
“The resulting explosion was massive and a man nearly lost his life. He remains badly-scarred by what happened that day.
“Tata no longer uses water to cool spillages and the risk has been eliminated. If the company had done this prior to the incident, this worker and his family would not be where they are today.”
A Tata Steel spokesperson said: “We carried out a full investigation into the cause of the incident and put into place a range of measures to prevent this type of accident happening again.”
