Two companies and a director have been prosecuted after four workers were crushed to death at an excavation site in Norfolk.

Claxton Engineering Services Ltd of Ferryside, Ferry Road, Norwich pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 9(1)(a) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007. It was fined £500,000 with £100,000 in costs.

Encompass Project Management Ltd of The Gables, Old Market Street, Thetford, Norfolk pleaded guilty to breaching Section 3 (1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. It was fined £200,000 with £50,000 in costs.

Charges against another contractor, Hazegood Construction, were ordered to lie on file.

David Groucott of Diss, Norfolk, pleaded guilty to breaching Section 37(1) of Health and Safety at Work Act. He was sentenced to seven-and-a-half-months in jail, suspended for two years, and ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid community work within 12 months. He was also ordered to pay £7,500 in costs.

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The Old Bailey heard how Adam Taylor (28), Peter Johnson (41), and brothers Thomas Hazelton (26) and Daniel Hazelton (30) were working for Hazegood Construction at the site on 21 January 2011. Daniel Hazelton was an employee, while the other three were self-employed contractors. Encompass Project Management was the principal contractor, with Hazegood operating as a contractor.

The men were building a large steel structure as part of the foundation for a large Pressure Test Facility (PTF) at Claxton Engineering Services in Great Yarmouth.

The horizontal steel cage being built would have weighed around 32 tonnes once completed, while the excavation for the horizontal PTF was more than 23 metres long, three metres wide and two metres deep.

During the assembly work, the structure collapsed on top of the four men. A large-scale emergency response took place to try and rescue the trapped workers, however the group was pronounced dead at the scene.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found serious flaws in the planning, management and monitoring of the complex project on the part of Claxton as well as Encompass and its company director, David Groucott.

HSE Construction Division Head of Operations Annette Hall said: "Those sentenced today failed the four workers who died. They didn't carry out their legal duties, leading to the events which caused their deaths.

"This was a long term, large scale and complex civil engineering project which needed to be planned, designed, managed and monitored effectively. The tragedy here is that, in the months leading up to the accident, any one of these parties could and should have asked basic questions about building the structure safely. Such an intervention could have avoided the tragic outcome of this entirely preventable accident."

(LM)