16.10.2025

Another crush fatality

A man died in a scissor lift entrapment incident last month in Koga on the north side of Fukuoka in Kyushu, southern Japan.

The incident occured on the morning of September 15th, the man - Ryuto Fumiya, 41 - was working alone installing formwork for a concrete pillar from a scissor lift on the site of a new logistics warehouse in the city. It seems he inadvertently operated the lift function and trapped himself between the guardrail and a steel beam.

Emergency services treated him for cardiac arrest, on route to hospital where he was pronounced dead around an hour after arrival.

The local Police have confirmed the basic details of the incident, having carried out an initial investigation, at this point they have put the incident down to operator error.

Same urban area same week
Later that week a man, 46, was seriously injured in Fukuoka City after falling from a scaffold he was installing at a gymnasium at Fukuoka University’s Ohori Junior and Senior High School. After resuscitation he remains critically ill with life changing injuries.

Vertikal Comment

Incidents like these are stark reminders of the risks from a making a simple operating error, it is particularly easy on scissors that have the classic single joystick and a rotary switch to select drive or lift, with no enable button to drag your attention to the control panel.

It can be so easy to pull or push the joystick to lift and find you left it in drive and surge over an edge, or iof left it in lift push the joystick to move, only to be pushed up into an overhead obstacle.

It also highlights the benefits of the latest anti entrapment systems that use beam sensors to detect overhead obstacles and warn or cut out before the operator bwecomes the sandwich filling between two pieces of steel.