A company has been fined $130,000 in connection with the workplace death of a Petawawa man. In January of 2017, Ethan Allard was killed after getting tangled in a concrete hopper at a construction site in Toronto. He was 24 at the time of the incident. His employer, Torrent Shotcrete Canada, was charged by the Ministry of Labour and on Tuesday, pleaded guilty to violating the occupational health and safety act by failing to ensure that a grate sensor on a concrete hopper was operational. The court documents say at the end of the shift, workers are required to clean the hopper out so that residual concrete wouldn’t harden. They go on to say Allard fell into the hopper with the concrete auger running and was killed. There was no eye witnesses and so it’s not known how he fell. The investigation revealed that wiring for the sensor had been altered to allow the hopper to operate without the safety grate closed. On Tuesday, Torrent Shotcrete Canada entered into a guilty plea and was also imposed a 25 per-cent victim fine surcharge, designed to assist victims of crime.
