Father of worker killed in conveyor belt says son worried about time pressures

Wes Tomich.

By Phil Pennington of RNZ

The father of a man who died after he fell onto an unsafe conveyor belt has spoken about his son’s worries over the time pressures at work.

It is the first time the family of Wesley Tomich have spoken publicly aside from their victim impact statements in court earlier this year.

They want to warn others to speak up about workplace risks.

Wes Tomich was a baseball cap-wearing guy.

In most photos he has one or other cap on – with his dog Em, short for Emma, at a family barbecue, kicking a ball with his niece.

“Yes, he was a character,” said his father, Anthony, who lives in Tauranga.

Born with a hole in his heart, he underwent an operation aged 16 months to fix it.

Wes Tomich with his father Anthony and mother Lee-ann.

“What stood out the most was his determination, you know, to accomplish what he wanted.”

Wes died, aged 37, on the machinery he was employed to maintain and operate, at Ballance Agri-Nutrients’ Mount Maunganui fertiliser plant in July 2023.

He and others had to regularly clean up fertiliser from under the large, exposed, fast-moving conveyor belts in the plant.

The company had twice been told to put proper guarding in place in the years before his death.

Attempting to step over a belt, he tripped and fell on it. His workmates witnessed him dragged under a metal frame.

The company was convicted and fined earlier this year on one health and safety charge. “Ballance is committed to recognising the failures and learning from this tragedy wherever we can,” it said in a statement.

Anthony cannot comprehend what went on.

“To me this is like something that you would have done 100 years ago, you know, a work practice,” he said.

Seven months on from the sentencing, Anthony, his wife Lee-ann, and the family are speaking out.

“If you don’t speak up, you don’t say anything, people will keep quiet,” said Anthony. “This will just continue.”

They do not feel they have had much of a say, or been heard, even through the drawn-out workplace safety investigation and coronial process, or from the victim impact statements they read in court.

“It’s just not OK,” said Wes’ younger sister, who has name suppression.

Speaking out, recounting memories

The whānau’s calls combine with their memories.

His younger sister’s most special albeit painful memory is how her brother loved her two daughters and treated them like they were his own. The youngest was eight weeks old when he died.

“He’d come over every week and there would just be chaos in the house. But good chaos, lots of teasing and laughter,” she said.

“He spoiled them terribly. And he would make up these ridiculous nicknames for them.”

Anthony coached his son in under-10s football at the Mount Action Centre.

“So it was quite a sort of like a very happy time for us doing that kind of stuff together,” he said.

In recent times, Wes would get up at 3am, and be in the gym soon after.

Their voices catch a bit as they talk to RNZ but they plough on.

It had been a “cruel” and unfair process, they said, that had left them with many questions, as basic as who made the decision not to fix the conveyor belts, though two independent safety assessments in 2015 and 2022 had raised the alarm, and as large as, how could the system be changed?

“I know there are others out there who have had to go through similar things,” said the sister.

“And that’s why I really want to make a change ... I don’t know what that looks like yet.”

‘Get out of there’

Anthony Tomich recently had to return to work, three days a week.

A fitter-welder by trade, he has had almost two years off, a big chunk of that recovering from a major heart attack that the courts accepted was directly linked to his son’s death.

“It’s been a struggle, you gotta go back there.

“The thing is, too, I’m not working very far from where Ballance is at the moment.

“Every time you hear a bloody siren go past, then you know, it just brings back memories.”

Wes and Anthony.

Each morning began with a “toolbox” safety briefing.

“You’ve got to talk about safety and that I find extremely hard, sad.

“They talk about a death or an accident, it just, it hits home.”

He remembers the phone calls he had with Wes about the service centre job he had been in just seven months when he died; he had been in casual work before that, and was pleased to have gone permanent, at least initially.

“So in the weeks just prior to this happening, he was phoning me and telling me that there were time constraints they were having at work,” Anthony told RNZ.

His son was also worried about having to watch out for inexperienced temporary workers.

“He became a little bit despondent with what was going on.”

But he did not know all of it.

“I had no idea what he was doing ... I had no idea he was working around live belts.”

He wishes he had known.

“I would have said to him, ‘Don’t be crazy. Get out of there. Don’t do it’.”

‘Know what your child’s doing’

A judge fined Ballance $420,000 on a health and safety charge. It paid some reparations to the family, and made what the judge said were “significant” safety changes.

Ballance was invited by RNZ to have an interview but issued the statement instead, the same one it put out after the sentencing in March.

“All who knew Wesley have been immensely impacted by his death,” it said.

It had fully co-operated with investigators and put new measures and training in place, it said.

“Too late. Way too late,” said Anthony.

“With regards to other people, you know I would say, make sure you know what your child’s doing. These companies, they’re taking risks.”

Wes was the 39th workplace fatality at that time in 2023.

His dog, Em, got very depressed afterwards, then got cancer, said his sister.

“We had to put her through chemotherapy and get her lump removed.

“She’s okay now, though, which is amazing. But yeah, it was pretty tough, you know, we didn’t want anything to happen to her.”

In the lead-up, Wes had been looking at moving to work in the mines in Australia. “He asked me to sort out a CV,” said Anthony, who has 28 years working on projects across Australasia to draw on.

So many of those companies, “their safety has been of such a high standard”.

“I just ... it’s hard for me to understand what went on here.”

The 2022 safety assessment mentioned non-compliant guards on machines 80 times.

“These aren’t accidents,” said his sister.

“It’s not an accident when you were warned about it years prior.”

‘Danger in plain sight’

WorkSafe in its report back after its five-month investigation in late 2023 said the “conveyor belt death-trap was a danger in plain sight”.

The family asked for an inquest but a coroner turned them down, in a final report stating the official investigation had covered things off.

“It is such a cruel process and it’s unfair and it’s so devastating, you know,” said the sister.

“Wes was here one day and gone the next, but it’s like he just disappeared and we’re left with no closure at all.

“We never got to see him before he was buried.”

She wants the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety to come and talk to her, and other families.

Brooke van Velden said her thoughts are with the family.

“I consider meeting requests from anyone at any time. I would encourage the family to send an email through to my office,” she said in a statement on Wednesday.

During her recent consultations over workplace safety reforms, she had heard from a range of people who had lost someone.

“I recognise that any death has a large and wide impact on community and a larger impact again on immediate family.”

This year, 31 people had been killed at work up until the end of August.

“You know, you see something unsafe, you’re meant to speak up at work,” Anthony said.