EX-MINERS who claim they contracted "vibratory white finger" from using hand-held power tools have fought off a renewed attempt by British Coal to block their damages claims at the first hurdle.

Three Court of Appeal judges rejected BC's challenge to a High Court ruling that from the beginning of 1973 it ought to have recognised that working with vibrating tools gave rise to a foreseeable risk of VWF and should have started taking precautions to guard against it from January 1975.

The judgment was a preliminary victory for nine former miners - aged between 40 and 71 - in a test case on which a large number of other claims depended.

It means that claims arising from VWF contracted after January 1975 can now go ahead, although the judges stressed that vital questions had yet to be answered in each case.

Those questions were:

whether the miner suffered excessive exposure to vibrating tools and equipment;

whether BC negligently failed to take effective precautions

whether VWF - involving loss of circulation in the fingers - was contracted as a result of such negligence.

BC had argued that it had had no reason to believe its operations carried any significant risk of VWF requiring precautionary action.

But Lord Justice Judge, sitting with Lords Justices Nourse and Waller, held that the results of a survey on VWF carried out by two doctors in the late 1960s should have prompted BC to conduct its own epidemiological investigation among its employees and take any appropriate action.

The judge said coalminers had a long history of accepting minor symptoms as "part and parcel" of a job in which the risks of sudden death, major injury or crippling disease were far more urgent concerns.

But the lack of complaints about VWF from the workforce did not mean that the incidence of the illness in the industry was insignificant.

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