Working at height is the most common cause of workplace accidents, a senior labour inspection official said after a 31-year-old man was critically injured at a factory in Larnaca on Thursday afternoon.
The accident happened while three people were fitting metal sheeting to a shed at a height of six metres as part of improvement works, said Tasoula Kyprianidou, Deputy Director of the Department of Labour Inspection.
The exact circumstances are still being investigated to establish whether any safety measures were neglected. Kyprianidou said safety measures were often skipped, particularly on small jobs, but stressed that every necessary precaution, such as a safety harness or protective structures, must be taken however small the task.
She said inspectors went to the scene immediately to make sure it was not disturbed before it had been recorded and witness accounts taken.
Three serious workplace accidents have happened since mid-September, one of them fatal. The other two left a total of four people seriously injured and in hospital. The department is also still investigating an accident in Strovolos on 9 October in which three workers were injured.
The department has 23 inspectors covering all districts. They carry out an average of 5,000 inspections a year, and the department has inspected 47,000 of the 130,000 workplaces that are subject to inspection.
Asked whether the department needed more inspectors, Kyprianidou said the need had already been recognised and the process of approving 15 more posts was under way. She added that, besides inspections, an important part of the department’s work was raising awareness and building a culture of protecting workers.
She said a positive sign was that the rate of accidents leading to more than three days off work had fallen over the past decade, according to the department’s figures.
(information from the Cyprus News Agency)
