The son says: “Should never have happened – disastrous” • “Dad will never call again”
It was on Tuesday, November 19 that the unlikely happened. Lasse worked at the garbage company Renova in Gothenburg and was out to clean a garbage container in Hisings Kärra. Suddenly, for an unknown reason, he fell into the three meter deep underground reservoir. There he was found lifeless and taken to Kungälv hospital, but his life could not be saved.
Lasse’s son Gabriel misses his father and says the whole situation still feels surreal.
– It hasn’t really sunk in other than that dad will never call again or that I will never get to see him again. I haven’t really understood that, he says.
Warned about the garbage can
At the company, Lasse was a safety representative and had warned on several occasions how dangerous it could be to carry out similar work without any safety measures.
– Dad’s task was to go on a little special mission and this time was such an occasion where a garbage man had dropped garbage in the container. He would then clean it out so that the bin could go back into the ground, says Gabriel.
When the machines are unable to remove all the rubbish, Lasse had to sort out the rest himself and do it by hand.
– Then he kind of had to fish out garbage bags with, for example, a rake that he couldn’t reach with the crane bucket. If you had used a vacuum cleaner, for example, it would have been smoother and more efficient and it would also have been much safer, says Gabriel.
The son Gabriel talks about missing his father.
The son Gabriel talks about missing his father.
Photo: Private
“Thinks it’s a disaster”
It took two minutes before the first witness saw him down in the underground container and raised the alarm. But the ambulance couldn’t get him up as he was down in the hole and everyone had to wait for the emergency services.
– He fell in and lay so badly that he couldn’t get any air so he suffocated himself. But how he fell in, if he had a heart attack or fell, we don’t know. But it doesn’t matter how he fell in, he would never have fallen down. There would have been some safety edge, fence or harness. It would never have happened, says Gabriel.
How do you feel that there was no such thing?
– I think it is catastrophic. We live in 2024, there is so much security right now. But how could this happen? He gets a mission and he has to lift off his own fall protection and work at a hole that is three meters deep. But there is no security at all. In order to complete the work, he needed to remove his own security. That he has also pointed out this himself, that it is not a safe work assignment. No one had thought of that. There was no safety plan. That shouldn’t happen.
Responding to criticism
Tony Carlsson is business area manager at Renova and for P4 Gothenburg he responds to the criticism.
– I know that Lars has performed this part of the work in some way could be difficult at times. I don’t know if there was a ladder or not, I’ll let the investigation run by the police and the Work Environment Agency to find out what caused this tragic outcome, he says.
Nice ending at the hospital
Gabriel remembers that he had just been shopping and was on his way home when his father’s boss called and told him.
– My sister tried to call dad but he didn’t answer. Then about half an hour passed before my sister called back and said that dad had suffered a cardiac arrest and is in Kungälv hospital and that we have to go there immediately, he says.
He describes the whole thing as surreal and even though it was only the respirator and the medicines that kept Lasse alive in the end, they had a nice ending in the hospital.
– We talked to him and we told funny stories about who dad was. We laughed and told stories and I know he was lying there listening. We got a very nice ending and he got to join in and hear the stories in there, he says.
The family has approved that TV4 Nyheterna publishes the picture of Lasse.