Ipsum warehouse roof fatality: work-at-height lessons for infrastructure teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
A Scottish contractor, Ipsum Drainage (Scotland) Limited of Hillington Park, Glasgow, has been fined £183,000 after 28-year-old employee Ross Hanratty died in October 2022 falling 24 feet through a fragile warehouse roof at Seafield Industrial Estate, Edinburgh, while clearing gutters. Hanratty was working alone on the second block roof, wearing a harness with no suitable anchor point, and fell into a unit occupied by Rembrand Timber. Investigators found no suitable and sufficient risk assessment, no safe system of work for fragile roofs, and inadequate information, instruction and equipment for a new worker at height.
Technical Brief
- Personal fall protection was limited to a harness with no fixed lifeline, anchor posts, or inertia reel system.
- No demarcated safe access routes, crawling boards, staging or roof nets were in place over fragile zones.
- Section 2(1) Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 breach confirms employer failure on safe systems of work.
- For comparable fragile roofs, robust controls would include collective edge protection, covers, load-spreading platforms and continuous attachment points.
- Ongoing operations on legacy industrial roofs should incorporate periodic structural condition checks and formal roof-access permits with supervision.
Our Take
Within the 425 safety- and failure-tagged pieces in our database, UK incidents like this one at Seafield Industrial Estate often trigger tighter local authority scrutiny, so contractors working for bodies such as the City of Edinburgh Council should expect more rigorous checks on work-at-height method statements and supervision records.
A 24‑ft fall on a short, two‑day job highlights a recurring pattern in our infrastructure coverage where ‘minor’ or quick-turnaround maintenance on industrial roofs and warehouses carries disproportionate fatality risk compared with longer, more heavily planned projects.
For multi-site operators like Ipsum Group with activities across Scotland, a single fatality case in Edinburgh typically leads, in our dataset, to group-wide reviews of fall-protection systems and subcontractor controls, which can temporarily slow routine maintenance programmes but reduce repeat 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.
Related Articles
Related Industries & Products
Mining
Geotechnical software solutions for mining operations including CMRR analysis, hydrogeological testing, and data management.
Construction
Quality control software for construction companies with material testing, batch tracking, and compliance management.
CMRR-io
Streamline coal mine roof stability assessments with our cloud-based CMRR software featuring automated calculations, multi-scenario analysis, and collaborative workflows.
HYDROGEO-io
Comprehensive hydrogeological testing platform for managing, analysing, and reporting on packer tests, lugeon values, and hydraulic conductivity assessments.
GEODB-io
Centralised geotechnical data management solution for storing, accessing, and analysing all your site investigation and material testing data.