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    Huws Gray £2.2m fine: conveyor guarding and safety lessons for engineers

    March 27, 2026|

    Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

    Huws Gray £2.2m fine: conveyor guarding and safety lessons for engineers

    First reported on The Construction Index

    30 Second Briefing

    Huws Gray has been fined £2.2m plus full costs at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court after 56-year-old labourer Paul Coulson was fatally crushed by a three‑tonne pallet of timber on a conveyor at the Herringswell Sawmills site in Suffolk on 22 May 2024. HSE investigators found workers had entered the conveyor framework at least 19 times in five weeks despite warning signage, with no physical guarding or system change implemented until after the incident. Post‑accident measures now include fixed guarding to prevent access, unwrapping pallets before loading, and expanded CCTV coverage of all conveyor angles.

    Technical Brief

    • Failure mechanism: worker entered conveyor framework to remove packaging and was struck twice by a three‑tonne pallet.
    • HSE investigation relied heavily on CCTV review, identifying 19 prior entries into the conveyor danger zone.
    • Existing control was limited to warning signage and stickers, with no physical guarding or interlocked access controls.
    • Post‑incident remediation included fixed guarding to prevent entry and procedural change to unwrap pallets off‑line.
    • Additional CCTV coverage now provides full conveyor visibility to operators, reducing blind‑spot start‑up risks.
    • Legal breach was under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, confirmed by guilty plea.
    • HSE guidance for sawmills stresses fixed‑distance and close guarding to meet reach‑distance requirements around reciprocating carriages.

    Our Take

    Our database also tracks Huws Gray’s expansion in timber merchanting (e.g. the relaunch of the former Thornbridge site in Ayr in early 2026), so this fatality at Herringswell Sawmills is likely to draw regulator attention to safety management systems across its newer timber branches as they ramp up throughput.

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    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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