A lying boatman from Fife whose failings led to the death of a diver in the Firth of Forth has been jailed after a sheriff said he had “effectively no safety measures” on board the vessel.
Guthrie Melville, 60, was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment over the tragedy, in which father-of-two James Irvine, 42, from Glenrothes, died after getting into difficulties in Largo Bay, on March 24 2011.
He could have been jailed for a maximum of just two years under the battery of health and safety regulations with which he had been charged.
Mr Irvine’s wife Hazel, also 42, immediately called for sentencing in such cases to be made comparable with culpable homicide.
Stirling Sheriff Court heard that Mr Irvine, a desperate-for-work unemployed kitchen fitter, whose only dive training had been a two-week holiday course in Turkey, had been recruited by Melville, owner of the 26-foot Solstice, to fish for razor clams.
The Solstice, based at Methil docks, is thought to have been using an unapproved technique to make the razorfish rise to the surface of the sandy bottom by trailing unprotected copper rods connected to an electric welder.
The set-up posed a risk of serious injury only a few milliamps could stop a diver’s heart.
The court was told that there was no way of knowing if this was what had happened to Mr Irvine; the rods were found and photographed on the Solstice the day after the accident but when police went back a week later to seize them as evidence, they had gone. Melville told officers he had dumped them in the sea.
When Mr Irvine’s body was found lying face-up on the river bed by a police frogman, there was plenty of air left in his breathing tank, neither of his two air-supply regulators was in his mouth but he had drowned.
After a five-day trial last month, a jury decided one thing was certain: Melville’s safety failings meant that once he had got into difficulties, his fate was sealed.
Melville was found guilty of a string of breaches of Diving At Work regulations and health and safety legislation, “in consequence of which” Mr Irvine failed to surface and drowned. It was his first day’s work as a diver.
Melville, of Kirkburn Drive, Cardenden, was also found guilty of putting five other divers at risk through similar failings over a six-year period between April 2005 and the date of the tragedy. He had denied the offences and claimed that he had been taking Mr Irvine out for “a pleasure dive”.
He even maintained the lie to social workers preparing a pre-sentence report.
Sheriff William Gilchrist said that Melville had ignored safety requirements on board the Solstice since 2005.
He said: “I can only conclude that this was a most serious and wilful breach of health and safety regulations, which resulted in a death.
“There has been no acceptance of responsibility on your part; you still maintain the pretence that Mr Irvine had hired you to go on a pleasure dive, whereas manifestly you employed him to go fishing.
“A custodial sentence is inevitable.”