KEY POINTS:
The Department of Labour is carrying out an urgent investigation into how a recycling worker lost his legs when he became trapped in a paper baling machine in New Plymouth yesterday.
The 36-year-old victim is in a critical but stable condition in Taranaki Base Hospital after the accident at the Taranaki Recycling plant shortly before 3pm.
The accident was horrifyingly similar to an incident two years ago when another New Plymouth man, Chris Fromont, lost his legs and an arm in an industrial mulcher.
A workmate at the recycling plant said the injured man was conscious after being trapped and had yelled out to his co-workers.
"He was yelling out 'my legs are chopped off'," he told the Taranaki Daily News.
The fellow worker said there was an emergency button the man could have pushed if he got trapped but it "was too late" for him to do so.
The newspaper said that the victim is understood to have lost both legs from the knees down.
Fire crews struggled to retrieve them from a compressed bundle of rubbish.
Department of Labour Taranaki service manager Brett Murray told the newspaper it was not known how the man had fallen into the baling machine.
"It was a compacting machine that bales up refuse, primarily cardboard and recyclables, into bales on a conveyer system and somehow he has fallen in."
He said the victim was not trapped for any significant time and had been taken to hospital before investigators had arrived at the scene. He was the only one in the immediate vicinity of the machine."
- NZPA
