30.09.15
Colas Rail strengthens controls after 'unacceptable' ballast dust safety breach
Colas Rail looks set to be made subject to an improvement notice after 25 workers carried out track works in a huge cloud of hazardous ballast dust.
The firm failed to impose appropriate health and safety measures, according to John Cullen of the Office of Rail & Road, giving evidence at a Birmingham employment tribunal at which Colas Rail was attempting to appeal against the improvement notice. The company is likely to now be compelled to carry out measures to protect workers from silica dust, which can cause health problems.
Colas Rail is among Network Rail’s top 20 suppliers, having won more than £90m worth of work on the national rail network in 2014-15. It had launched its appeal after claiming the incident at Watford railway station was a “one-off” situation.
But following a three-day hearing, tribunal judge John Keith rejected the appeal and decided that the improvement notice should be enforced.
Cullen told the tribunal he visited the site as part of his job and found the 25 workers unloading ballast containing silica dust and working on the tracks. He said he found the workers in a cloud of silica dust without protection masks and other safety measures.
He explained: “There was no protection and I could not identify any Colas overall rail supervision on the site. This was a breach of the regulations. I later issued [a] notice of improvement against the firm.”
The tribunal was told a video had been made available about the health hazards of silica dust and James Ageros, representing Cullen, described the incident as a “serious event and completely unacceptable”.
He said: “These 25 workers were from different contractors and were inhaling the dust. Colas should have had a highly regulated system of protecting them.”
Cullen had wondered if there had been similar breaches on other rail sites, but Colas insisted there had not.
James Maxwell-Scott, representing Colas, said the firm admitted that a manager had made a mistake on the day but that full safety measures were soon been implemented. He questioned whether there was a need for an improvement notice.
Colas Rail says it will not attempt to further contest the improvement notice, which will appear on the ORR website later this month.
Colas Rail’s head of safety, Paul Taylor, told RTM that when the company took the corporate decision to appeal the notice, it also “continued to further strengthen” its controls.
Taylor said that at the tribunal, the judge asked John Cullen “whether our management system was suitable for controlling the risk of ballast dust, to which he answered a very clear ‘yes’.
“The management system itself had everything in place it should – the issue was it not being applied on site.”
He suggested that human nature means people will rarely choose to voluntarily wear masks for hours, and so education on the risks is key. He explained: “As well as strengthening our management system further, we’ve put a lot of effort into communication and education of the staff on-site as to the risks and the controls that are in place.”
He added: “Both Colas Rail and the rail industry have got a lot of clarity out of the tribunal, in terms of what’s expected of the industry in managing ballast dust.
“We’ve got benefit out of [the appeal], even if it wasn’t a turnover of the notice.”
Last week, Taylor debriefed the industry working group on ballast dust, chaired by Network Rail, to help it provide better advice on the controls that need to be in place for ballast dust.
“We got benefit out of the tribunal as Colas Rail, and we’ve shared that with the industry, and the industry is now getting benefit from the clarity that’s come from the findings of the tribunal.”
(Top image shows track works at Watford – note, this is a library image and does not show the specific event in question)