Lima Construction window fall death: edge protection lessons for site engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Lima Construction Limited has been fined £50,000, plus £11,347 costs, after worker Antonio Rodrigues fell three metres through an unglazed, unprotected Juliet-door window void onto an internal concrete floor during a former department store redevelopment in New Malden. The HSE found the principal contractor failed to install temporary boarding or internal scaffold guard rails over the newly formed openings and stopped carrying out the legally required weekly scaffold inspections after 5 July 2022. Inspectors stressed that straightforward edge protection at the time the voids were created would likely have prevented the fatal fall.
Technical Brief
- Failure mechanism involved a three‑metre internal fall through an unglazed Juliet‑door opening onto concrete.
- Damaged glazing panels on delivered Juliet doors created an “unusual situation”, leaving multiple voids temporarily unfilled.
- Protective timber boarding was only installed across the window openings in the hours after the fatal incident.
- HSE judged boarding or additional internal scaffold guard rails to be reasonably practicable fall‑prevention measures at void creation.
- Weekly statutory scaffold inspections had ceased after 5 July 2022, removing a key opportunity to identify unprotected openings.
- Investigation was constrained by absence of CCTV and eyewitnesses, so causation analysis relied on site condition evidence and timing.
- Monitoring and remediation learning: treat any newly formed façade opening as a notifiable edge, requiring immediate temporary protection and explicit inspection checklist items.
- Legal breach was of CDM 2015 Regulation 13(1), reinforcing principal contractors’ duty to plan, manage and monitor work at height.
Our Take
This Lima Construction Limited case sits alongside recent HSE prosecutions of Alchemist DB Limited and Willow Services (Southern) Ltd in our database, underlining that falls from relatively modest heights are now a consistent focus for enforcement and fines in the UK construction sector.
The three‑metre internal fall in New Malden reinforces a pattern in our safety‑tagged coverage where inadequate edge protection or inspection regimes on small residential or refurbishment jobs attract the same legal scrutiny as major infrastructure sites.
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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