WorkSafe has urged employers to address workplace fall hazards, calling the amount of serious but preventable incidents that still occur “frustrating”.
In the past five years, 41 Australian workers have died and 7,395 were seriously injured in workplace falls, with nearly 500 of those incidents occurring in the Barwon South West.
Since 2018, WorkSafe has accepted 489 claims from workers seriously injured in falls in the Barwon South West region, including 28 claims since the start of 2023.
In March this year Sentenal Technologies Pty Ltd was sentenced in the Geelong Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to three charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
The company was ordered to pay just short of $40,000 in fines and costs after a WorkSafe inspector saw five workers on the roof of a Corio warehouse without harnesses or edge protection.
WorkSafe Executive Director Health and Safety Narelle Beer said no matter the size or scale of the job, it was never acceptable to take short-cuts when working at heights.
“A fall can happen in just seconds but the consequences can last a lifetime, including devastating injuries and loss of life,” Dr Beer said.
“Yet despite the well-known risks, we still see things like workers on a roof without fall protection, harnesses not attached to an anchor point, poorly installed scaffolding, platforms without guardrails, unprotected voids and unsafe ladders.”
While construction work poses the greatest risk of serious injury or death from falls to workers, falls happen across all industries; after construction, the next most common industries for falls claims in the past five years were transport, postal and warehousing, manufacturing, arts and recreation services, health care and social assistance, education and training, wholesale trade and retail.
The cost of falls is high for employers, with the 17 successful prosecutions conducted by WorkSafe this year leading to $1.1 million in fines, costs and enforceable undertakings.
Ms Beer said while many employers do the right thing, inspectors still saw too many incidences of “blatant disregard” when it came to working at heights.
