STRUCK BY BUCKET

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 680, 4 June 1929, Page 7

STRUCK BY BUCKET

LABOURER CLAIMS £926 PT. CHEVALIER ACCIDENT Struck on the head by a falling bucket during the construction of the Ambassador’s Theatre, Point Chevalier, in November last year, Joseph Francis Hayes, a labourer, sued his employer, Walter Scott, a Mount Albert contractor, for £153 loss of wages, £23 hospital expenses, and £750 damages, before Mr. Justice Kennedy in the Supreme Court today. Mr. L. P. Leary represented the plaintiff and Mr. Finlay appeared for defendant. The victim of the accident, Hayes, admitted he had not had previous experience in hauling cement up to a scaffolding. He could not recollect the type of hauling hook used on the day he was injured; nor could he remember being hit by the bucket, though he remembered that several buckets had fallen earlier in the day, one grazing his face. He had been offered £SO compensation by defendant’s insurance company for the injury and, since the accident, had been paid two-thirds of his wages. Since the mishap he had been wracked by severe headaches and his memory was affected; it had left him in a lethargic condition.

The opening evidence for the defence was that of two rope experts, James Patmore and Geo. Gibbons Valbpy, who definitely asserted that the rope showed no signs of a double hook having been attached by insertion through the strands. John Walter Aldiss, John W. Tong, Herbert Horace Brodie, and Neil John Clausen, experts in building construction, gave evidence that the ramshorn type of hook was commonly used by contractors and was regarded as the safest. They agreed that the “J” type of hook was dangerous, buckets being liable to fall by striking an obstruction when coming down. The possibility of buckets falling from a ramshorn hook was very remote.

An eye-witness of the accident, Edwin Burt, foreman bricklayer, identified the hook of the ramshorn type as that attached to the rope when the mishap occurred. He denied that a double hook was used during the day. From the scaffolding he witnessed the whole incident. Hayes raised a bucket of cement to a height of 15 feet, where it caught on a ledge. Instead of easing it away Hayes jerked the rope, spilling the concrete, and ho smothered up to avoid the shower of cement. The bucket then dropped on the hauler. He definitely contradicted the statement that Hayes had been struck by a bucket being lowered to the ground.