CORNER BROOK — The City of Corner Brook has been fined $7,000 and must contribute another $2,500 to the provincial government to conduct a public education event supporting workplace safety awareness after pleading guilty to offences under occupational health and safety legislation Tuesday.
Three of the five offences the city was charged with were withdrawn by Crown attorney Patricia Carpenter of Clarenville, who appeared via telephone, when the city entered guilty pleas to the remaining two offences.
The charges included failure to employ flagpersons when certain conditions or circumstances exist and failure to provide and maintain a safe workplace and necessary equipment, systems or tools.
The offences relate to an accident in March 2009, when a 75-year-old woman struck two city employees doing road repair work on O’Connell Drive.
The accident happened on a dark evening on which the weather conditions were highlighted by fog and drizzling rain.
The court heard the men were doing cold patch repairs on potholes, but there was no flagperson employed to control traffic on the street. There were also no warning lights and the signage used was deemed inadequate.
The workers did have a municipal pickup truck parked ahead of them with its four-way flashers on, but they were working behind it, Carpenter told the court. They were struck by the woman who never saw the men until she was upon them in her car travelling in the same lane the two men were repairing.
After striking the two workers, the vehicle collided with the city truck.
The city employees and the woman were all taken to hospital. The woman was released shortly thereafter, but the two workers were injured, with one of them in worse shape than the other and requiring a longer recovery period.
The city was directed by the Department of Government Services, under which the Occupational Health and Safety branch operates, to modify its traffic control procedures to ensure the safety of workers immediately following the incident. Jamie Merrigan, who represented the city in court Tuesday, said this directive was carried out.
Merrigan said the existing policy the city had at the time of the accident contained a “subjective” element with regard to deeming the employment of a flagperson necessary.
