FP McCann fined after quarry death: falling object controls for plant engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
FP McCann has been fined £110,000 at Antrim Crown Court after subcontractor William Houston died at the company’s Loughside Quarry cone crushing plant in Larne in April 2023. A 45kg stone, manually removed from a blocked cone crusher and carried along a raised conveyor catwalk about 15ft above ground, fell through the railings and struck Houston as he walked below. HSENI’s major investigation team stressed the need for controls to prevent falling objects, citing simple measures such as exclusion zones beneath elevated work areas.
Technical Brief
- Blockage occurred in the cone crusher; plant was isolated before manual removal of the obstructing stone.
- The obstructing stone weighed approximately 45 kg and was transferred by hand along the elevated catwalk.
- Raised conveyor catwalk was about 15 ft above ground, with railings that allowed the stone to pass through.
- Failure mechanism: uncontrolled manual handling of a large rock on an elevated walkway with inadequate edge containment.
- Investigation emphasis was on controls to prevent falling objects where work is carried out at height.
- Monitoring and remediation focus includes establishing exclusion zones under elevated work areas and reviewing access/egress routes.
- Case reinforces quarry operators’ duties under work-at-height and workplace safety regulations for both employees and subcontractors.
Our Take
Among the 419 safety- and failure-tagged mining pieces in our database, very few involve Northern Ireland, so the Loughside Quarry fatality is likely to draw disproportionate scrutiny to UK quarrying practices rather than hard‑rock mining per se.
The incident on a raised conveyor catwalk at around 15 ft aligns with a cluster of UK and European cases in our coverage where access to elevated crushing and screening equipment became a critical control point, suggesting operators may face tighter expectations on fixed guarding, blocked chute management, and work-at-height permits around cone crusher plants.
Although FP McCann is better known in construction circles than in mainstream mining coverage, its presence in our mining safety corpus underlines that quarrying and aggregates operations are being treated by regulators and courts with similar seriousness to large open‑pit mines when it comes to fatal incidents.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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