Mitolo Group was sentenced in the South Australian Employment Tribunal on 21 March 2025 following a SafeWork SA prosecution.

The company was charged with breaching section 32 of the Work Health and Safety Act over its failure to adequately separate forklift operations from pedestrians inside a workplace.

The incident occurred at Mitolo’s Penfield Gardens potato processing facility on 30 May 2022 when a worker standing next to his stationary forklift was struck by a second reversing forklift, suffering a crushed pelvis, spinal fractures and internal injuries.

A SafeWork SA investigation found Mitolo failed to ensure the ‘specials’ line area where the incident occurred had a designated safe stopping zone for forklifts.

It also failed to ensure there were adequate processes and procedures in place for the management of workers and forklifts entering and/or remaining in the specials line area.

The injured worker stopped his forklift in the specials area next to a marked designated pedestrian walkway and disembarked to fetch a pair of gloves.

A second worker began to reverse his forklift, striking the injured worker and pinning him between the two forklifts.

After the incident, SafeWork SA issued two prohibition notices on the two forklifts involved and two improvement notices requiring Mitolo to review their traffic management procedure for mobile plant and pedestrians working at the workplace and implement a process to ensure forklift pre-start checks.

Mitolo fully complied with the statutory notices and also complied with six non-disturbance notices issued to preserve the incident scene and eight notices to produce information during the investigation.

In June 2022, after the incident, Mitolo carried out a written hazard identification and risk assessment (HIRA) of forklift operations, which identified additional hazard controls that were reasonably practicable to implement.

The HIRA took into account the need to safely manage about 200 forklift movements per hour, or an average of one every 20 seconds.

Since the incident, the company has made significant improvements including updating its Traffic Management Plan to include a safe stopping procedure; updating forklifts to include special reversing lights, retraining workers, and; installing an elevated pedestrian walkway, additional signage, an elevated work platform, bollards and safety railing within the workplace.

In handing down his judgement, Deputy President Lieschke said Mitolo had taken ‘significant steps’ to separate forklifts from pedestrians.

“Mitolo’s offence resulted in unsafe traffic management in the specials area,” Deputy President Lieschke wrote.

“This resulted from Mitolo’s serious failure to ensure the safety of its employees so far as was reasonably practicable. It failed to do so because it did not identify and implement all the reasonably practicable safety measures that were available, many of which were later implemented.”

He recorded a conviction against Mitolo Group, fined them $180,000 and ordered they pay a Victims of Crime Levy of $424 and a contribution of $3,410 towards SafeWork SA’s legal costs.

Attribute quotes to SafeWork SA Executive Director Glenn Farrell

Hazard identification and risk assessments (HIRA) are vital steps in managing worker safety in work environments such as those involving forklifts and pedestrians.

At this site there were eight forklifts used daily around pedestrians in one facility without appropriate traffic management in place.

This put workers at risk of serious injury or death and sadly in this case that risk was realised.

Any business with mobile plant operating amongst workers should have this identified as a critical work health and safety risk and prioritise high order controls to prevent the devastating consequences of the two coming into contact with each other.

Far too often we are seeing adequate controls being put into place after an incident has occurred.