A $40,000 fine has been argued as too light a penalty for a Bright company which put employees at risk by having no safety procedures for transporting heavy machinery.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Two employees at Stadelmann Enterprises found out how dangerous this could be on September 25, 2015, when they loaded a 17,000-kilogram excavator onto a truck to move a fallen tree on Back Porepunkah Road, 10 minutes away.
They used their own knowledge to try to evenly balance the truck and slowed down around bends, but it was not enough.
The overloaded trailer swayed “excessively”, causing the truck to run off the road into a ditch and the trailer to flip, throwing the excavator onto a nearby bike path.
The driver suffered a broken vertebrae and soft tissue damage in his back and neck.
Stadelmann Enterprises was fined without conviction in the Magistrates’ Court in April after pleading guilty to failing to provide a safe workplace, but the DPP appealed the sentence in Wangaratta County Court on Thursday.
Crown prosecutor Chris Carr said the trucks had no weight gauges or positional markings, and employees were never taught how to safely load the machinery.
“It's not that the trailer is overloaded, it's much more serious than that – the company wouldn't know,” he said. “The danger was extremely grave.”
A WorkSafe investigation found the pintle hook on the truck had snapped and the safety chain attachment points were damaged.
Four years before the incident, VicRoads had advised Stadelmann Enterprises about the safest ways to transport its equipment.
“This company knows there's an issue around this and it doesn't do anything about it,” Mr Carr said.
“The consequences if something does go wrong are very, very serious – as it's identified in the charge – death or serious injury.”
Barrister Peter Rozen said that ironically, Stadelmann Enterprises was contracted by VicRoads and councils to clear snow and trees to ensure roads were safe for motorists.
He said co-director Harold Stadelmann took the charges seriously and was modernising the company while taking over from his father.
“This particular prosecution has been a wake-up call … it has from the outset accepted it did the wrong thing,” Mr Rozen said.
“We say a $40,000 fine is a significant fine, that is a lot of money for this company.”
Judge Damian Murphy will hand down his decision on Friday.
