A seafood company has been fined \u00a380,000 after a fisherman died when his leg became caught in a rope and he was pulled overboard.<\/p>\n
Mark Elder, 26, from Thurso, was working on the creel boat North Star off Cape Wrath on 5 February 2018.<\/p>\n
He was helping to deploy creels when he became entangled in a coil of rope and was dragged overboard and into the sea.<\/p>\n
Thurso-based Scrabster Seafoods Ltd was fined after pleading guilty to health and safety breaches.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Tain Sheriff Court heard Mr Elder’s crew-mates tried to stop him from going into the water.<\/p>\n
It took about 10 minutes for him to be brought back on board. Efforts to resuscitate Mr Elder continued for more than an hour, but were unsuccessful.<\/p>\n
A Maritime and Coastguard Agency investigation found that Scrabster Seafoods’ directors had no experience of operating and managing fishing vessels.<\/p>\n
The probe also found they had failed to arrange or complete the required new risk assessment when they purchased the boat in November 2016.<\/p>\n
The court heard changes were made to the boat that should have initiated fresh risk assessments.<\/p>\n
Scrabster Seafoods pled guilty to contraventions of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.<\/p>\n
Speaking after the sentencing, Debbie Carroll, who leads on health and safety investigations for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, said: “Mark Elder lost his life in circumstances which were foreseeable and entirely avoidable.<\/p>\n
“Had the required risk assessments been carried out and safe systems of work been put in place then Mr Elder may well be alive today.<\/p>\n
“Hopefully this incident should prompt other employers to consider their duties and that failing to keep their employees safe can have fatal consequences\u202ffor which they will be held accountable.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":1,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[406],"region":[1916],"source":[1286],"country":[2031],"state":[],"city":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/103128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/newss"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/103128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103129,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/103128\/revisions\/103129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103128"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=103128"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=103128"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=103128"},{"taxonomy":"state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/state?post=103128"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=103128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}