Mount Lyell inquest: Makeshift platform had 'only one way to go', structural engineer says
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The faulty platform two miners were working on before they fell to their deaths had "a high risk of failure", an engineer has told a coronial inquest.
Coroner Simon Cooper is examining the deaths of three miners at the Mount Lyell Copper Mine in Queenstown.
Craig Gleeson, 45, and Alistair Lucas, 25, fell to their deaths on December 9, 2013, when the wood platform they were working on collapsed.
Thirty-nine days after the pair died, 55-year-old Michael Welsh was crushed by a sudden inundation of mud.
The court has heard the work platform was a makeshift construction made from lengths of King Billy pine.
Mr Gleeson and Mr Lucas were not wearing harnesses because "they got in the way", the inquest heard, and fell 22 metres onto rocks when the platform broke.
On day four of the inquest, which began in Queenstown earlier this week but has now moved to the capital, Hobart engineer Adam Richards, who prepared a report on the fatal platform for Worksafe Tasmania, spoke.
He told the inquest today the pine platform appeared doomed to fail.
"An engineer would not choose to use King Billy pine," Mr Richards said.
"The orientation of the grain was such it would not be considered a structural timber in any event."
Mr Richards said the platform failed along its grain and was "overstressed to the tune of about 30 per cent".
He said with an estimated combined weight of 264.1 kilograms, the platform was bending and should have been considered within the "medium" load category, demanding extra design protocols.
"The capacity was exceeded … there was a high risk of failure," Mr Richards said.
"Nothing was fixed. It was just planks sitting on planks. There was no redundancy in this structure at all."
The inquest previously heard from a mine supervisor, the platform had been subject to a "wiggle test".
Mr Richards told the court proper platforms would be designed to shift and redistribute weight in the event of it coming under strain, but the pine platform had no such capacity.
"The way it was put together … there was only one way for it to go," he said.
The mine has been in care and maintenance mode since the death of Mr Welsh, and 200 jobs were lost.
The inquest continues.
Topics: death, community-and-society, courts-and-trials, mining-industry, hobart-7000, tas, queenstown-7467
