By David Healey, Senior Solicitor · May 2026 · Accidents at Work

On the morning of 21 June 2023, at an offshore supply base in Peterhead, a 700-tonne steel tank split along a bolted seam. A 62-year-old contractor surveying the tanks was swept across the yard along with a 12.5-tonne cherry picker. He sustained life-changing injuries.

At Peterhead Sheriff Court on 13 May 2026, the operator was fined £350,000. The case was prosecuted in Scotland, but the legal framework under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 applies equally in England and Wales. The HSE inspector described the failure as completely preventable: corrosion had been identified in an inspection report ten years earlier, and no remedial work had been carried out.

This is the most public version of a pattern that runs through workplace injury claims every week: an employer who knew about a risk, on paper, and did nothing. The engineering is dramatic. The legal point is ordinary. The same doctrine decides cases involving forklifts, ladders, fume cupboards, and pallet stacks.

So What Actually Went Wrong at the Tank?

The tank was a bolted steel cylinder more than thirty years old. On the morning of 21 June 2023, staff filled it to capacity to clear space at the company’s Aberdeen site. Less than thirty minutes after the final load was pumped in, the tank ruptured halfway up its shell, splitting vertically along a bolted seam.

HSE’s investigation lays out the structural cause. Approximately 4.5mm of the original 5.5mm steel plate had been lost to external corrosion over the tank’s working life. The protective coating had failed, allowing external corrosion to progress. The density of calcium chloride brine (more than one third denser than water) added load the corroded plate could no longer carry.

The decisive document is the 2013 inspection. HSE found that it had already flagged extensive corrosion on the lower section of the tank and at the bolted connections. No remedial work followed. The company was unable to produce evidence of any consistent inspection regime in the years between the 2013 inspection and the 2023 rupture. Filling the tank to capacity on the morning of 21 June 2023 was a conscious operational decision.

HSE concluded that the failure was “wholly foreseeable and preventable.” After the incident, the company removed all bolted tanks from its sites and closed its Peterhead operation entirely.

Why £350,000? The Two Sections of Law That Did the Work

The company pleaded guilty to breaches under two sections of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. The first was section 3(1), which puts a duty on every employer to conduct its undertaking in such a way that people who are not its employees, including visitors, contractors, and members of the public, are not exposed to risks to their health or safety. The second was section 33(1)(a), which makes failure to discharge that duty a criminal offence.

The £350,000 fine reflects the sentencing court’s view of both culpability and harm. Culpability was high. The risk had been identified in writing a decade before the rupture and no remedial action had followed. Harm was at the upper end: life-changing injuries.

Two things matter for anyone reading this who has been hurt at work. First, section 3(1) is the section that reached the self-employed contractor injured at Peterhead. The duty travels with the premises and the undertaking, not with the employment contract. Second, the criminal verdict and the civil claim run on parallel tracks. The same facts can support both, but a civil claim does not need a criminal conviction to succeed. The documentary evidence that the employer knew about the risk and failed to act is what carries the case.

What This Verdict Means If Your Employer Knew About the Risk That Hurt You

The Peterhead case is the cleanest example you’ll see in a generation. The evidence sat in the company’s own filing cabinet for ten years. Most workplace injury claims that turn on “the employer knew” look nothing like this on the surface. The evidence pattern is usually shorter, more recent, and more ordinary.

In the everyday version, the worker injured by a known risk had been raising the issue informally for weeks. A colleague had reported a near-miss. The accident book has an earlier entry from a different worker on the same machine. The risk assessment on file is generic and does not address the specific task being done. A maintenance manual sat unread on a supervisor’s desk. The same forklift had been flagged as wobbly in two consecutive checks.

All of these are documentary trails. The doctrine does not need a dramatic warning ignored for a decade. It needs proof of two things: the risk was known to the employer (or should reasonably have been known on the evidence the employer had), and no reasonable step was taken to remove or reduce it. The “should reasonably have been known” part is what lawyers call constructive knowledge. In a civil claim it carries the same weight as what the employer actually knew.

What Evidence Actually Wins These Claims, and Where to Start If You’re Carrying an Injury

The same five steps apply whether the case is a 700-tonne tank or a wobbly stepladder. Each one is about pinning the documentary trail down before it disappears.

What Kind of Workplace Injury Are You Carrying?

If the scenario above doesn’t quite match yours, here are the specific accident-at-work claim types Carter & Carter handles.