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Safety chief orders that steel harbour ladders are replaced

The States is to spend £26,000 on steel ladders at the inner harbour after safety watchdogs demanded they were replaced.

The Health and Safety Executive, based in Guernsey, had been alerted to a resident's serious fall from one of the fixed steel

ladders in February.

On 14th September it served an improvement notice giving the States a month to take action - an instruction which carries the weight of the law.

Richard Brown, Chief Health and Safety officer, inspected the harbour ladders when he came over to evaluate safety matters in the wake of the Commercial Quay crane breakdown.

His department were not summoned in the aftermath of the accident, but the States commissioned a private health and safety firm called Normandie Health to survey the harbour. Inspectors found that they were "too polished". But as a private firm it could only make recommendations to the States.

Mr Brown said: "We weren't asked to

comment on the ladders at the time of the incident itself. But we were there anyway and we had a look at the ladders. It doesn't matter if it's someone falling off a ladder or a roof, once you've had an accident you have to investigate and see what the causes of that accident were so you can prevent something similar happening again."

He continued: "My view on the ladders was fundamentally that they didn't comply with any British standards. They talk about all kinds of things you should comply with, like distance between rungs and diameter between rungs. The biggest problem in my view was that they weren't made to any standard or complying with any of those enforced today."

In his notice to the Harbour Office it stated that the stainless steel fixed ladders in the inner harbour "are known to be the cause of a major injury to a member of the public who attempted to use them".

A spokesman for the Harbour Office said it had been decided that the existing stainless steel ladders would be taken down while quotes for new ones were gathered.

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