Firm got €15m after chemical explosion

A PHARMACEUTICAL company received €15 million in an insurance payout following an explosion at its plant which claimed the life of one of its employees and seriously injured another, a court heard yesterday.

Corden Pharma Ltd, trading as Corden Pharmachem Ltd, registered at South Mall, Cork, received the payment in compensation for an explosion at its plant at Little Island on April 28th, 2008, which killed a father of one, Liam Nodwell.

Corden Pharma has pleaded guilty to the four breaches of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 following the explosion which also led to another employee, Jimmy O’Sullivan, who was working with Mr Nodwell, suffering serious injuries.

Cork Circuit Criminal Court heard yesterday that Mr O’Sullivan, who is in his 30s, is suffering from chronic rheumatoid arthritis while he also suffered from glass puncture injuries in the accident. He continues to receive medical treatment.

Tom Creed SC, defending, told Judge Patrick Moran that Corden Pharma had received €15 million in compensation. It had used €7.5 million to pay redundancies to 92 staff, €4 million to decommission the plant, while it had invested €3.5 million in research.

In his closing submission, Mr Creed said the company, which made a profit of over €500,000 on a turnover of €26 million in 2007, had not skimped on safety and had invested €440,000 on safety during the year that the accident happened. The court had earlier heard that the fatal incident, which happened in production unit 2, resulted from operator error when Mr Nodwell failed to add acetone to a container to take the heat out of a chemical procedure in which two other substances were being mixed.

Defence witness chemical engineering expert Dr Simon Waldron, told the court yesterday he believed the accident occurred as a result of four or five errors when the batch-processing sheet instructions governing the process were not followed closely.

These errors included failing to add acetone to the process, failing to record the sump volume, failing to cool down the vessel in which the mixing was taking place and failing to complete an inerting procedure which removed oxygen from the container, he said.

Dr Waldron said the training culture at Corden Pharma was impressive, in that the company devoted time and resources to both internal and external training courses. Both Mr Nodwell and Mr O’Sullivan had participated in some of these training courses.

The court had earlier heard from HSA inspector Michael Boylan who said Corden had breached safety regulations by not properly assessing the risk and consequences of omitting acetone from the process.

The company had previously been fined €2,000 for a breach of health and safety rules on March 2nd, 2008, over its storage of waste materials and €5,000 for another breach on March 7th, 2008, relating to a similar process to that which led to the fatal explosion, he said.

Judge Moran reserved sentence in the case until Tuesday.