A window cleaner working on O'Connell Street, Dublin, was sitting on a window sill having just unhooked his safety harness when an inside door blew open and a gust of wind knocked him out the window, the inquest into his death has heard.
David Crowley (40), Donaghmede Drive, Kilbarrack, Dublin, was killed in January 2005, when he fell two storeys from a window sill at Lower O'Connell Street.
A Health and Safety Authority inspector told Dublin City Coroner's Court yesterday that a risk-assessment of the cleaning job by Mr Crowley's employer, Emerald Contract Cleaners Ltd, should have been carried out. HSA inspector Frank Kerins said the authority had identified five potential hazards at the cleaning job where Mr Crowley lost his life.
A jury recorded a verdict of accidental death and recommended that Mr Crowley's former employer carry out risk-assessments and compile reports for employees about the risks of each individual job.
The jurors also recommended that access to rooms where window cleaners were working be out of bounds to prevent "wind-tunnel effect". Coroner Dr Brian Farrell said he would pass on the recommendations to the company "and to any other regularity authority in the hope that something positive can come out of this".
The inquest heard that Mr Crowley, a window cleaner for many years, had just finished cleaning the outside window of the Business and Community Ireland offices on O'Connell Street when he was knocked backwards by wind. "The wind caught the door and blew him out the window," co-worker Martin Kavanagh told the court. "All I could hear was Dave screaming."
He said Mr Crowley would never go out a window without a harness and had just unhooked it when a gust of wind blew open an inside door. "He was the most safety conscious person I ever worked with." He said it was standard procedure in the course of his work to check that doors were firmly shut but that they frequently blew open despite this.
Every three months, employees of Emerald Contract Cleaners attended health and safety meetings, he added.
Eyewitnesses saw Mr Crowley try to grab hold of a sign on the outside wall as he fell. "I saw him grappling with a sign, then the sign broke and he fell," according to a statement by Bernard Moody, who was not in court. "I can still hear the noise of him falling and that noise stays with me."
Mr Kerins said if members of Mr Crowley's company had done a proper risk-assessment, potential hazards could have been identified, including that the window ledges from where Mr Crowley fell were narrow and there was distracting clutter in the room.
No representative for the company attended the inquest.