Basildon Crown Court heard that Noel Mayne was carrying out land reclamation work in the early hours of the morning when the bulldozer he was using became bogged down in water-logged silt that was being piped ashore by a dredger.

He used his mobile phone to request assistance from the driver of a nearby excavator at the Stanford-le-Hope development on 23 April 2011.

Mayne, 59, had left the cab of the bulldozer and was standing on a platform step while the excavator reversed towards him in order for him to hook a steel tow rope from the bulldozer onto a tooth of the excavator’s bucket.

The court was told the excavator driver turned the vehicle so the arm and bucket were towards the rear of the bulldozer.

During this Mayne was seemingly struck by the bucket. He was found lying partially submerged in water behind the bulldozer and died at the scene as a result of extensive crush injuries to his chest and upper torso.

HSE found that Dredging International (UK) had failed to draw up safe working procedures for the recovery of bogged down vehicles – despite the entirely foreseeable risk that this type of incident would occur.

Mobile phones were the sole means of communicating incidents and, in the absence of instruction and training, drivers had developed ad hoc methods of recovery. This required some drivers to leave the safety of their cabs, which brought them into contact with other heavy machinery.

Surey-based Dredging International (UK) was fined £120,000 and ordered to pay £26,473 in costs after pleading guilty to breaches of Health and Safety laws.

After the hearing, HSE inspector Paul Grover said: “Hydraulic land reclamation operations are high risk operations by their very nature.

“However, despite identifying the entirely foreseeable risk of heavy machinery becoming bogged, Dredging International failed to undertake a suitable and sufficient risk assessment.

“This meant that drivers at London Gateway Port, provided by a contractor, were left without safe working procedures, instruction, and adequate command and communication systems to effectively manage obvious and frequently occurring risks.”