SUPREME COURT $4500 Damages Claim After Fall Into Caustic Soda Vat

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31786, 17 September 1968, Page 10

SUPREME COURT $4500 Damages Claim After Fall Into Caustic Soda Vat

A young man who fell into a 3ft deep vat of steaming caustic soda in an electroplating factory claimed $4500 damages from Ins employer in the Supreme Court yesterday. David Francis Thompson, aged 23, now a shop assistant, alleges that the Christchurch Electroplating Company, Ltd, was negligent in taking insufficient steps to prevent him from standing on the edge of the vat, and insufficient steps to cover the vat when it required him to stand on the edge.

For Mr Thompson, Mr B. McClelland said that the employer’s son showed him how to straddle the vats when cleaning them or fishing for fallen objects with a wire hook. “That was a shocking way to. show any employee how to rid the tank of these oblects,” he said. “To expose him to such a danger was unnecessary and negligent. “He was also shown how to use a magnet on a bit of wire. You walk, believe it or not, along that death track between the vats. This was negligence if ever there was negligence— «n extraordinarily dangerous way to do the job.” Mr McCelland said the company had also infringed the

Factories Act in failing to take the necessary measures to protect employees. Mr Thompson said In evidence that the vats contained caustic soda heated close to boiling point, cold sulphuric acid, cold hydrochloric acid and cold water. There was a division about sin or 6in wide between them, which became coated with salts.

The objects being cleaned or plated frequently, fell in, and the manager’s son showed him how to climb on to the edge of the vats and walk along to retrieve them with a hook. He also had to climb on to the vats when checking the electrodes.

He said the manager once said to him that he was not happy about the way in which that was done and that it almost made him sick. “He told me to be very careful,” Mr Thompson said. “He’d seen me up on the vats hundreds of times.”

On July 7, 1966, he helped clean out a water tank with a long-handled broom. He was wearing rubber-soled boots and was straddling the water tank. He then turned and put both feet on the ledge of the next tank, containing hot caustic soda. ' He said he reached for the wire book, intending to fish fallen objects out of the

(caustic vat, and fell in, feet first. “1 remember myself slipping and that’s all,” he said. “The caustic reached to the top of my thighs. “I lifted myself out into the cold water vat I don’t know how I got out I think I more or less fell into the water bath from the top of the other one.” To Mr J. N. Matson, who appeared for the defendant company, Mr Thompson said the wire hook was not long enough to reach the middle of the vat from the end when he was standing on the ground. “If it was,” he said, “we wouldn’t have got up on the tanks.”

He denied having been reprimanded for standing on a stack of chemicals. He also denied that the foreman bad told him not to get up on to the tanks. Leslie John Roy. senior plastic surgeon at Burwood Hospital, said Mr Thompson was in hospital for three weeks. He had superficial second degree burns on both forearms and both legs from the tops of the thighs to the ankles. The burns were particularly painful because of the frequent changes of dressings required to treat the caustic soda bums. The case will continue today.