Goulburn Valley Water will have to wait until May to find out the sentence in a court case involving a worker whose hand was mangled in equipment at a Mooroopna plant.
The water corporation pleaded guilty in Shepparton Magistrates’ Court to a charge of failing to provide and maintain a safe working environment.
The charge comes after an employee’s hand was caught in machinery at Goulburn Valley Water’s Mooroopna North wastewater plant on October 15, 2021.
The court heard the man’s role included monitoring, collecting and cleaning the wastewater management system at Goulburn Valley Water’s facilities.
On the day, the man had tried to free solid materials — such as wet wipes — wrapped around an auger on a piece of equipment that separated solid materials that had been placed down pipes from wastewater that would be cleaned and used on farms.
When he was not able to free it by hand, the employee used a metal pipe to break up the material.
When this did not work while the machine was idle, the man turned it back on and used the pole to poke at the material from a distance.
The prosecutor told the court the pole suddenly became entangled, jammed and twisted around the auger, dragging the man’s hand into the machine.
The man lost the top of his finger and the rest of it was “mangled” in the incident, while another finger was “de-gloved”, the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor also told the court how when a WorkSafe inspector attended the facility six days after the incident they observed an area on the machine behind the guard “posed a risk of entanglement and crushing injuries to employees who performed the task of removing solid materials from the inlet structure”.
He also said the guard was inadequate and it needed to be an interlock physical barrier that would allow access only when the machinery was not operational.
When he visited again on December 17, 2021, he found an interlocking device had been fitted, and a safe work instruction had been developed for the task of inspecting and cleaning the machinery.
Goulburn Valley Water had also made changes to the emergency stop controls.
The prosecutor told the court Goulburn Valley Water had installed interlocking devices to the guards on inlet structures at some of its other sites, and this could have been done at Mooroopna North.
The prosecutor told the court that before the incident there was no safe system to remove solid materials from the inlet structure.
Goulburn Valley Water’s defence counsel admitted a guard was not in place on the equipment that should have been.
However, he argued that members of senior management were “shocked and disappointed” about what had occurred at Mooroopna North “because they thought they had a system in place” and since then had “put a lot of care and attention in to make sure it never happens again”.
“I can’t emphasise enough the seriousness with which they are taking this,” he said.
The defence said the injured worker had returned to work since the incident.
He also spoke of how community-minded Goulburn Valley Water was, providing millions of dollars in flood support last year, and sponsoring local sporting clubs.
He said the incident was “on the lower end of the scale” of seriousness.
“If it had have been something that was pointed out, they would have fixed it,” he said.
“It stems from people putting all sorts of things in the sewerage system.”
The prosecutor, however, argued that it had been identified that humans “would cut corners”.
“It is not a case where there was a system to deviate from, they (the employees) were left to their own devices,” the prosecutor said.
“They did have knowledge but allowed them to operate in a way that was a risk to their health and safety.”
Magistrate Ian Watkins will hand down his sentence in May.