A factory worker who thought she had witnessed a fatal accident has been awarded almost £19,000 damages against her employer, Cadbury (Ireland) Ltd, for post-traumatic stress injuries. Mr Richard McDonnell, counsel for Ms Eithne Curran (58), a chocolates conveyor-belt operator, told the Circuit Civil Court that the woman believed she had killed a colleague.
He told Judge Bryan McMahon that Ms Curran had not been informed by management that a fitter, Mr Jimmy Whelan, was inside her conveyor machine carrying out repairs when she hit a power button. Judge McMahon was told that "all hell broke loose" when Ms Curran, of Beechlawn Grove, Dublin, heard Mr Whelan screaming. It was only then she realised he was inside the machine.
Ms Curran said she worked from the "blind side" of the conveyor belt and could not have seen Mr Whelan. The only way she could have known he was there would have been through direct information from her supervisors.
After hearing Mr Whelan's screams she hit the emergency "off" button before running more than 40 yards to the other side of the conveyor to find him trapped in the mechanism and struggling to escape by getting out of his clothes. Ms Curran told the court she thought she had killed him.
Afterwards he was found to be suffering from no more than bruising to his arms. She said she had "gone to bits" afterwards and experienced serious shock and emotional distress, including nightmares and sleepless nights for which she had medication.
Judge McMahon heard that a "message", confirming the machine had been switched off while Mr Whelan worked on it, had been passed from behind a glass screen by way of "a bookie's tictac signal" to a colleague of Ms Curran. The message had not been relayed to her. The judge held that Cadburys had been liable in negligence and breach of duty in its failure to communicate fully and unambiguously such a serious message both to Ms Curran and her fellow worker. Judge McMahon said a supervisor who had been called away had left a dangerous situation unguarded and there had been a failure by Cadburys to provide a better warning system.
A new information system had since been installed. The judge also held Cadburys negligent for the failure of the worker who had received the message to pass on the information to her. Drawing a distinction between primary and secondary victims, Judge McMahon said the secondary victim was the person who came on the scene after an accident and, as a result, suffered post-traumatic stress. He said the classical secondary victim case was that of Mullally against CIE where a bus travelling from a football match had crashed, injuring more than 40.
The injured, including Mr Mullally and his three children, had been taken to various hospitals. Mrs Mullally, although not on the bus, had recovered damages for nervous shock. She had received a telephone call to attend hospital and on doing so had experienced "battlefield" conditions in her frantic search for her husband and children.
Judge McMahon held that Ms Curran was a primary victim in that she was "in the eye of the storm". She had been at the heart of the accident when it happened in March, 1996, except that in her case she had no fear for her safety. Hers was a fear that she had killed or seriously injured somebody else. "That fear was a reasonably foreseeable fear given the negligence of the defendants," the judge said. He awarded Ms Curran £12,000 damages for the stress, £5,000 for future suffering and £1,700 special damages.