What Do Directors Need to Know about Confined Space Hazards?

We’re often asked what Directors need to know about confined space hazards. Clearly, it depends on the size of the company and the nature of the company. A confined space is something like a drain, a process vessel or something like a road tank where there might be toxic fumes, lack of oxygen or risk of drowning.

The most common one that people come across is a conventional drain, where there’s a manhole cover. Sadly, people can die entering those drains, due to high levels of hydrogen sulphide, which is virtually instantaneously fatal. It’s the rotten egg gas, but at high concentrations, you stop smelling it. It paralyzes the respiratory centre of the brain.

At Quadriga we’ve dealt with many cases of confined space fatalities, and they quite often result in two or three people being killed. Executive Chairman, Ian Clements, acted as an expert witness in a case, of an agricultural company, which was storing apples in a warehouse, prior to going to supermarkets.

1% Oxygen

Their system was that the warehouse was sealed, with controlled temperature, humidity and oxygen levels. The oxygen level was reduced to 1% to stop the fruit rotting. 1% oxygen won’t support life. We normally are breathing about 21%. Very low levels of oxygen don’t cause you to be out of breath because your body responds to high carbon dioxide, not low oxygen. You have no knowledge when you’re in a low oxygen environment. You don’t feel shortness of breath or anything. You just collapse and die.

The manager of this facility, who had taken a party of schoolchildren around the outside of it, some months before this incident said to the children, “It’s 1% oxygen in there. If you went in there, you’d be immediately dead.”

In the top of this internal warehouse was a manhole hatch, about a meter square. When they want to sample the apples, they open the hatch and lift out a bag of apples from the top tray. But that wasn’t good enough, this manager. He wanted to win fruit competitions. So he’d introduced a procedure where his staff, holding their breath, went in through the 1 square meter hatch and crawled across the top of the apples looking for the optimal fruit, whilst holding their breath. They had been doing this for a number of years.

Scuba Diving

They even had a term for it – Scuba Diving. On this occasion, the first person, who was in his mid-twenties, went in. He must have tripped, sneezed, died. His colleague went in after him. He died too. It was a harrowing case, but, again, an obvious hazard. The same type of hazards can occur in a drain, a water tank or a process vessel if there aren’t the right procedures, the training and the rescue arrangements in place. These are fundamental points which have been known about for over 100 years.

Each year, through our work, we see several people die as a result of entering a confined space without the right precautions. Directors need to know that they have policies and systems in place, that either prevent their people from entering confined spaces; or so they know why they shouldn’t. If they must enter a confided space, there must be right procedures in place of gas monitoring, ventilation, breathing apparatus and rescue arrangements.

The result at the apple farm was a prosecution of the company, but also a prosecution of the manager concerned. The company didn’t actually know this procedure was taking place, and they were prosecuted under confined spaces regulations. The manager was jailed for gross negligence, individual manslaughter. He was jailed for two and a half years, but the sentencing guidelines have changed since that time. Now he would receive a sentence of 12-18 years for the same offense.

If you need any advice on preventing such a tragic loss of life and the responsibilities of the Directors of your organisation, please contact Quadriga by calling 0118 929 9920 or by clicking here to arrange a time to speak.