A North East firm has been fined more than £750k after a crane collapsed at one of its sites on the South coast.

A major incident was declared and hundreds of people evacuated after the incident at Falmouth Docks in Cornwall.

The site, managed by Hebburn-based ship repair firm A&P Flamouth, was the centre of a huge cordon on May 10, 2017.

The A&P Group also has a site in Hebburn, and ran a site on Teesside until earlier this year.

The Health and Safety Executive said the 258 workers on site at the time were put at risk as the crane wasn’t properly maintained.

The crane had been operating above Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) ship, Tidespring, when the driver noticed the jib was descending uncontrollably.

The driver managed to move the crane away from RFA Tidespring and over the dockside before it collapsed, with the jib landing on a cage of acetylene cylinders.

A&P Falmouth Limited, of Wagonway Road, Hebburn pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) and Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The company was fined £750,000 and ordered to pay £26,792.30 in costs at Truro Crown Court on Friday (October 11).

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HSE inspector Melissa Lai-Hung said: “This was a very serious incident and it is fortunate nobody was injured or killed as a result of this catastrophic failure at Falmouth Docks.

“We thoroughly investigated this incident and found that A&P Falmouth Limited’s system of maintenance was not effective in preventing the collapse of the crane.”