Brampton assembly plant fined after worker critically injured

A Brampton company is facing a significant fine in connection with a serious workplace accident that occurred in July 2018.

A Brampton company is facing a significant fine in connection with a serious workplace accident that occurred in July 2018.

The Ministry of Labour says Android-Brampton LLC, a company that provides module assembly and supply chain management services used in vehicles, is being fined $65,000. The fine was imposed after a worker was critically injured by falling machinery.  

The court also imposed a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge as required by the Provincial Offences Act. 

The province says that on July 12, 2018, a worker was installing half-shafts into automotive rear differential units for Fiat Chrysler automobiles. To complete the task, the worker used the Knight Air Lift Assist device at the station, a pneumatic operator lift-assist arm that is used to pick up an item (in this case, the rear differential unit) from the shipping box and place it on an installation fixture at a workstation on the assembly line.

The province says the device is suspended from an overhead bridge or gantry crane. 

As the worker was using the arm, the southern end of the crane bridge/horizontal beam detached from the left side overhead trolley assembly and fell. The Ministry says this caused the pneumatic device and attached Knight Air Lift Assist device to also fall and strike the worker. 

The injury required hospitalization.

The (then) Ministry of Labour’s investigation into the cause of the incident determined that the secondary restraint cable holding the crane bridge to the trolley had snapped. Indentation marks on the body of the trolley showed that the secondary restraint cable had held the weight of the crane bridge for some time before snapping.

The province says the investigation determined that failure of the crane was a recurring event, given a previous overhead crane failure in 2017, and that Android-Brampton had not implemented measures to prevent this failure from recurring.