HAMILTON, ONT. — Siding design and installation company John Kenyon Limited of Hamilton has been fined $225,000 after a 2023 incident at Stelco Lake Erie Works in Nanticoke took the lives of two workers.
According to an Ontario bulletin, the incident occurred on April 25, 2023.
For background, at Stelco’s Lake Erie Works, coke is produced in an oven and transported by a rail and trolley system to a quench tower. Coke is a fuel source and an agent to convert iron ore into molten iron in a blast furnace. The quench tower at the facility is a metal structure approximately 120 feet tall that acts as a chimney to direct steam produced during the quenching process, when water is poured onto hot coke in the trolley car, the bulletin describes.
During the siding replacement work on the quench tower undertaken by Kenyon, the coke oven remained in operation with the trolley car automatically transporting hot coke to the tower. For every quench, the Kenyon workers would move the boom lift used in the siding work a safe distance away.
On the day of the incident, two workers were in the basket of the lift approximately 40 feet off the ground. Two other workers on the ground assisted by signalling when the workers in the boom lift needed to move away from the tower.
As the coke oven operation started, the Kenyon workers acknowledged a signal by the ground crew but did not move the boom away as warned. They still did not move the boom after a second signal, the bulletin reads.
The ground workers did not engage the emergency controls to move the basket away from danger and when the trolley car automatically parked itself at the base of the tower, the ground crew began shouting to the boom lift workers to get the basket away from the tower and sounded a horn.
After 30,000 gallons of water poured onto the hot coke in the trolley car, steam rose up the quench tower and escaped through the gap in the external wall being worked on. This resulted in fatal injuries to the two workers on the lift.
A Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development investigation determined Kenyon did not ensure its workers followed the Stelco safety procedure correctly.
The two deaths would have been avoided if the workers had made sure to move the basket away from the quench tower at the first signal.
Two workers were fatally injured when the defendant failed to take the reasonable precaution to ensure the workers were not performing work on a quench tower while the quenching process took place, contrary to section 25(2)(h) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
The company was convicted on March 3 in the Ontario Court of Justice by Judge Joseph De Filippis.
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