There is the law, the safety plans, the instructions. And there is the daily life of a major construction site, recalled the hearing of the Rennes criminal court on Monday March 25, shedding light on an accident that occurred eight years ago on the city’s metro construction site. “Eight years and three months”corrects Bertrand Le Goff, civil party, to emphasize how much each day costs him without his left leg.
At the end of 2015, the Sainte-Anne station is still only an open-air excavation 22 meters deep. An exceptional project due to the number of companies working on it at the same time, in “coactivity”. The accident-prone situation requires great coordination: precise phasing determines who works where and when.
In the pit or “bottom of excavations”, the Guintoli company (subsidiary of NGE) levels the rock with a backhoe equipped with a huge rotary cutter “with hooks, like a jaw”, specifies the president of the court. It replaced the hydraulic rock breaker whose vibrations weakened the neighboring church, causing six months of construction stoppage.
Botte Fondations (a Vinci subsidiary) then intervenes to spray concrete on “sails”, the walls of the future station. It employs Bertrand Le Goff, a 43-year-old qualified mason, father of three children, on a temporary basis for five days, to take over the rating. On November 30, he warned his boss that 20 centimeters of earthworks were missing on wall no. 7. Disregarding the phasing, Guintoli’s excavator was called back to the area.
A “degraded situation”
Bertrand Le Goff moves away from it by moving along a perpendicular wall, on an embankment. A moment later, the ground gives way under his feet and the strawberry catches his leg. It will take two hours to extract it, seven hours of surgery to save it, followed by months of pain and another operation two years later.
Referred to justice for involuntary injuries by a legal entity and by deliberate breach of a particular obligation of prudence or safety with incapacity for work of more than three months, the two companies plead for acquittal. Claiming claims rates below the construction industry average, they claim to have duly addressed the risks in their specific safety and health protection plans.
“I don’t understand why the strawberry left its growth zone”the representative of Botte Fondations said in surprise at the stand, according to whom a barrier on the embankment was useless, because “It only serves to signal the danger, but Mr. Le Goff was aware of it.” “ She would have fallen with him”adds the Guintoli representative. The two men commissioned, however, are not sure of anything, and for good reason: they are not the ones who supervised the project. “After the accident, we added a milling helper to guide the excavator. Should we have done it before? It doesn’t seem to me, because there were instructions”will plead in Guintoli’s defense.
You have 47.7% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.