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SINGAPORE – A maritime trade worker, who had not received proper training, died after descending into a tube at the Keppel Shipyard facility on Benoi Road in 2014 and suffocated due to the presence of argon gas affecting the oxygen level there. .
Mr. Perumal Azhaguraja, who worked for Alpine Engineering Services, had used a rope to descend into the tube, which was 90 cm wide and 30 m deep, to retrieve foam pieces around 11 a.m. on May 19 of that year.
One of his colleagues, Mr. Renganathan Chandrasekaran, who noticed that Mr. Perumal had gone silent about five minutes later, entered the subway to check.
He found Mr. Perumal unconscious at a depth of 22 meters and then the two men were arrested.
They were transferred to the National University Hospital, where Mr. Perumal died around 1 in the afternoon. Mr. Renganathan was not injured.
Alpine Engineering was fined $ 190,000, while Keppel Shipyard was fined $ 70,000 on Thursday (September 24).
The companies had previously pleaded guilty to a crime under the Workplace Safety and Health Act.
The prosecutor for the Ministry of Manpower, Amos Tan, stated in court documents that Mr. Perumal’s job duties included performing rope access work, as well as polishing and painting work within the shipyard.
Shortly before the tragedy, his supervisor had asked him to remove some pieces of foam from the tube. Mr. Perumal was not wearing a gas detector when he entered the tube.
Investigations revealed that some tubes in the area were installed using tungsten inert gas welding, and a tungsten electrode was used to produce the weld for the joints.
Mr. Tan said: “To ensure that the joint finish was of the required quality, the welding had to be done in an argon gas environment.
“(Foam was installed) in the (tube) to create a space where argon gas would be pumped to create an argon gas environment for welding to take place.”
The court heard that some 400 liters of argon gas had been pumped into the space between some pieces of foam in the tube to prepare for welding work before the accident.
When Mr. Perumal later entered the tube, the argon gas displaced the oxygen around him, causing the suffocation.
Mr. Tan said that Alpine Engineering had failed to ensure that its employees were adequately trained to work in confined spaces. Some of them also did not attend a “gas detector carriers” course.
Alpine Engineering also did not have the necessary rescue equipment, such as a tripod lift system that could be used to retrieve a worker from a confined space.
“If the tripod lifting system had been provided, (Mr. Perumal) could have been pulled out of the (tube) quickly,” Mr. Tan said.
Keppel Shipyard, for its part, failed to ensure that Alpine Engineering workers had the experience to perform jobs in a confined space.
It also failed to ensure that the workers working on the pipes had attended the “gas detector carrier” course.
In sentencing, District Judge Adam Nakhoda called Alpine Engineering’s failure to comply with regulations as “systemic” and said: “The presence of argon gas would have to be a foreseeable risk … It would be vital to (Mr. Perumal ) have a gas detector and know how to use it. This is especially true because argon is colorless and odorless. “
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