Construction company fined $150,000 after worker injured after falling from bucket of front-end loader

A front end loader machine tipping sand in a quarry. Photo: Adobe Stock

A construction company in Ontario has been fined $150,000 after a worker was injured after falling from the bucket of a front-end loader.

On Nov. 3, 2021, a construction crew from Regional Sewer and Watermain Ltd. was on site at a project on Myers Road in Cambridge, Ont., when a crew supervisor instructed them to remove a decommissioned hydro service to an existing building at the project.

The foreperson asked an equipment operator to meet them by the building with a front-end loader.

When the operator arrived with the front-end loader, the foreperson stepped into the bucket and gave a hand signal to raise the bucket, which brought them up high enough to cut the wires to the hydro service on the building.

When the foreperson finished cutting the wires, the wires recoiled, causing the foreperson to lose balance and fall out of the bucket to the ground below.

Section 107 of Ontario Regulation 213/91 prohibits workers from using the bucket of a front-end loader as a work platform in this manner.

Regional Sewer and Watermain Ltd. failed, as a constructor, to ensure that the measures and procedures prescribed by section 107 of Ontario Regulation 213/91 were carried out at the project, contrary to section 23(1)(a) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Following a guilty plea in Provincial Offences Court in Kitchener, Regional Sewer and Watermain Ltd. was fined $150,000. The court also imposed a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.