Lack of maintenance caused lift to fall 25 metres, injuring three workers

Martin CMIOSH
Member - 7 posts

I believe that under LOLER the statutory inspection inteval for lifts is 6 months. I would expect organisations to follow suppliers maintenance procedures that - I presume - would feature a more frequent regime of visual inspections and physical testing.

My concern is that it appears that one failure led to the uncontrolled discent. I presumed that equipment like this would be fitted with multiple levels of protection so that if the brakes failed then an emergency brake would automatically be applied.

I often feel that we spend too much time controling the risks of minor equipment and fail to recognise the risks from equipment like lifts as we take them for grantage and use them without considering what is actually happening.

David Price
Member - 80 posts

What is more worrying is the company who's lift this was are a well known and very wealthy company. and they have NO excuse as to why it has not been maintained.

Do they not have a facilities manager? or safety officer? and if they do, does he therefore not have copies of the service engineers work sheets? If no sheets then no maintenance, how can this lift have been under maintained without anyone noticing.

If companines like P&G don't normally flout the law, so someone should and probably will get their ass kicked for this incident. If this kind of thing has been over looked in just one of their buildings, it begs the question of just how many other areas in relation to Health & Safety are they allegedly not complying with elsewhere??