18.09.2024

Mast climber inquest

The inquest has started into the death of David Bottomley, 53, and his son Clayton, 17, which occurred when the mast climber they using to carry out cladding work on the Unity building in Liverpool on the 19th of May 2021 went into free fall from the 21st floor to the seventh floor roof.
See: UK mast climber fatality
An investigation has focused on the failure of the brake and emergency parachute system. It has involved contractors Laing O’Rourke, the mast climber supplier Adastra Access, and the machine's rack & pinion gearbox supplier Nord Gear. The information we have is the mastclimber was manufactured by a European or North American company.
David Bottomley was declared dead at the scene while Clayton died in hospital four days later.

A witness statement read out in court said: “I saw the two of them to grab a railing and seemed to brace themselves before a series of loud clicks where the platform would drop about a foot before it dropped into freefall".

The inquest is scheduled to continue into next week, we will do our best to keep up the developments.

Vertikal Comment

It is simply atrocious and totally unacceptable that details and more information on this tragic incident is only now coming to light, more than three years after the incident occurred.

It is quite ridiculous that the focus in the UK is all on blame and prosecution, rather than learning from the mistakes that caused it and spreading that information far and wide in a good easy to digest report. Other countries seem to have no problem at all in publishing such reports on their incidents, on average within six months.

Not only does it take years in the UK, but the resulting report will almost inevitably be second rate in comparison to those put out by the Swedish and Australian authorities to name just two.

The report into the fatal Swedish hoist incident in December is model of how it can and should be done. Surely this is something that the associations and safety inspectors insist changes.