On 25 November 2015, a scaffolder died after falling into a process vessel at a refinery. A bank of six digesters at the refinery had been off-line for maintenance and refurbishment work since July 2015. All pipework had been disconnected and scaffolding installed in August for refurbishment work inside the digesters. When the refurbishment work was almost complete, scaffolders began dismantling the scaffolding. Scaffolds had been removed from three digesters in the days before the fatal accident. On the day of the incident, a five-man scaffolding team had established a ladder at the bottom entry of a digester that still contained scaffold. The scaffolder had gone up a series of stairways over three levels, with another team member, to the top level of the digester bank to enter through the top manway of the digester being worked on. However, he inadvertently entered a manway into an adjacent digester, from which the scaffold had already been removed, and fell about 12 metres.
Scaffolder falls from height in a process vessel at a refinery – fatal
