Employers fined $20,000 after manager’s quad bike crash

A farm manager has been awarded reparations of $50,000 after a 2012 quad bike crash at work that left him with permanent brain damage.

His employers were fined $20,000 for failing to keep him safe at work.

This is not the first time an employer has been fined over a quad bike accident.

In 2013 Craggy Range vineyard in Martinborough was fined $36,000 after a contract worker was injured in a quad bike accident, and the company ordered to pay $6500 in reparations.

In 2014 share-milking company Holden Farms Limited was fined $28,125 and ordered to pay reparations of $75,000 after a farm hand died when the quad bike he was riding rolled on top of him.

In the latest case, the farm manager broke his neck and sustained permanent brain damage when his quad bike hit a large tree while he was rounding up his dogs.

He was not wearing a helmet, although one had been purchased for the farm.

He was in an induced coma for two weeks.

The farm owners, Karen Anne McLanachan and Kenneth Rae McLanachan, were sentenced on Monday in the Gisborne District Court under the Health and Safety in Employment Act for failing to take all practicable steps to ensure the safety of their employee.

The sentencing judge, Justice Russell Collins, said the McLanachan’s key failure was not having hazard identification or controls in place.

He stated that it was “as obvious as night follows day” that had the defendants had a health and safety plan in place, then it would have followed that there would have been a clear direction that no-one was to get on the quad bike without a helmet.

A 2014 investigation by WorkSafe health and safety inspectors could not determine why the bike collided with the tree.

Ken McLanachan said the accident had occurred in 2012.

As an employer, he was expected to have a written plan, and to have had meetings with staff to go over the plan.

He and his wife lived four hours away from the station where the accident took place.

Courtesy of stuff.co.nz