Man died ‘after being crushed under 40 tons of cheese’

A man died after being crushed when 40 tons of cheese fell on him while he was working in a cold-storage warehouse in Dublin, an inquest has heard.

Robert Ceremuga (32), from Littlepace View, Clonee, Dublin, suffered catastrophic crush injuries when a shelf rack collapsed in the VP Foods cold-storage warehouse in Jamestown Business Park, Finglas, on November 28th, 2013.

The accident happened in a store room where up to 80 tons of cheese were stored on stacked pallets. A forklift driver was working in the storeroom and had removed 30-40 pallets of cheese from the lower shelves that morning.

The driver had only been working for the company for a number of weeks and had no formal forklift training, health-and-safety inspector Frank Kerins said.

The driver was sitting in the forklift when Mr Ceremuga entered the cold store with a clipboard and asked if he had taken his break.

It was not clear if the forklift struck the shelf or if the racks buckled under the weight of the pallets stacked on the higher shelves, Mr Kerins said.

“The whole thing started to sway and the pallets started coming down . . . it was all top-heavy, once it buckled, it was not able to take the weight. Forty pallets came down. The whole room was a mangled mess of pallets.”

The forklift driver jumped out of the cab and ran from the room, but Mr Cerebuga had no time to react, the court heard. Each pallet contained a ton of cheese blocks weighing 25kg each.

“It all came down very quickly,” Mr Kerins said.

Garda Keith McGrath said the deceased was found slumped against a wall in the storeroom. “There was a huge volume of boxes scattered around the store room with shelving for pallets of cheese that had collapsed.”

The cause of death was crush injuries to the head and chest, a postmortem found.

The jury returned a verdict of industrial accident and recommended that forklift training be provided to all operators and that all racking systems should be emptied before any adjustments were made to them.

Mr Ceremuga’s daughter was just four months old when he died, his widow, Maria, said in a statement through her solicitor, Kieran Johnston.

“She was his pride and joy. I lost my best friend and my entire world. He was ambitious and hardworking. He was an exceptional man. I think about him every day.”