A roofing manufacturer in Warrnambool Victoria has been convicted and fined $40,000 after a worker suffered serious injuries when they were told to bypass a machine’s safeguards to clean it.

Uniroll Roofing was sentenced in the Warrnambool Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to one charge of failing to provide or maintain a safe system of work and one charge of failing to provide employees with necessary information, instruction or training. The company was also ordered to pay $4207 in costs.

The court heard the inexperienced worker, who had only started at the company a week earlier and had not received any documented training, was tasked with operating a metal forming press, which rolled metal sheets through a series of rollers, in April 2022.

The worker noticed the rollers were depositing marks on the metal and shut the machine down to clean them. Seeing this, the company’s co-owner advised there was a more effective way to clean the rollers, and showed the worker how to program the machine to bypass the interlock guarding and clean the rollers while they were still operating.

Seconds later, the scouring pad the worker was using became caught in a roller and dragged his hand into the machine, crushing and degloving two of his fingers.

The worker required multiple surgeries and was not able to return to full-time duties until August 2022, when his employment was terminated.

It was reasonably practicable for Uniroll Roofing to have implemented a lock-out tag procedure requiring workers to turn the machine off and isolate power to it prior to cleaning.

Furthermore, the company should have provided adequate information, instruction and training on this procedure, and cleaning should have only been undertaken when the rollers were not operating.