AN inquest jury has ruled that a Midland mum found electrocuted at her home next to a boiler was unlawfully killed.
Emma Shaw, aged 22, received a fatal electric shock in her flat in Jefferson Place, Grafton Road, West Bromwich ,while she mopped up water from the floor after the heating appliance sprang a leak, the inquest at Smethwick Council House found.
During a seven-day inquest, jurors were told of a catalogue of blunders carried out by employees from Staffordshire firm Electrical and Building Services leading to Miss Shaw’s death, on December 14, 2007.
Her son Brayden, then aged 23 months, had been shut in the living room while his mother went to tend the boiler in a hallway cupboard.
Brayden is now being cared for by his dad, Miss Shaw’s then-partner, gas engineer Andy Cross, 29, who found the mum’s body on the floor.
Jurors said installation work on the boiler was “not adequate” and criticised its “poor layout and poor design”.
A screw fixing up plasterboard in apartments had gone through a cable, causing live electricity to escape into the stud wall.
This had not been detected because insulation resistance tests had not been carried out properly on the wiring, the inquest heard.
And water from the boiler also became live when some of it seeped under the skirting board.
In their inquisition form, members of the jury blasted “the failure to report a known hazard of trapping cables and not making tradesmen aware of this fact”.
They found further fault in the fact there had been no drawings prepared of the site, so that workmen would know where electricity “safe zones” were in the flat.
Jurors ruled testing on the flat, was “not carried out to a professional standard if at all”.
They said that there had been a “failure by the company to assess the capabilities of their workforce and constantly monitor their development” and a “failure to comply with their health and safety standards”.
Black Country coroner Robin Balmain told the inquest that he would use coroner’s rules to write to the National Inspection Council for Electrical Installation Contracting, voluntary regulatory body for the electrical contracting industry, asking if anything can be done to curb the practice of electric workers signing safety certificates based solely on information reported to them by others.
“The dangers of that ought to be obvious to anybody,” Mr Balmain said.
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