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Ravensthorpe farmer loses hand in machinery accident

Updated

It took a tractor oapronxff the road, but more than a year later, John Breen is still paying the price.

The 60-year-old farmer lost his hand on a wheel that was broken in a tractor accident in April 2015.

“The driver of the tractor lost his leg and after six weeks [of rehabilitation] they had to relearn everything we learned, so we’re back to learning all the time,” he said.

“I think it will probably be 12 to 18 months before we start moving forward.

“My kids now are up on wheelchairs and I can do all sorts of things they can’t do, but we have to give 바카라it more time.”

John, who started the farmer’s advocacy group, Handyman Farmers, said the company did everything right, including giving him his new hand four years ago.

However, he lost about $1,500 off the price of repairs so far.

“I know that they got what they could out of it, so now I’m just going to go through the rest of my life and see if I can’t find something better,” he said.

“I’ll probably only get to that [lifelong job] when there is a job coming in the same type of work that I did 20 years ago.”

Mr Breen said people were being put off from starting a new business after losing their hand.

“Some of them had been farmers for 70 years - to have it done three years later - people are just not interested and I would say this is the worst case scenario,” he said.

“[I'm] talking probably between 6,000 and 6,500 people, if not even more and that’s if a job came up.”

When reache바카라d by the ABC last week, the company declined to comment on Mr Breen’s case.

“Our policy is to not comment on the specific individual circumstances of this person or on what our hand-raising training was like,” a spokesman for Handyman Farmers said.

Topics: handyman-farms, offbeat, melbourne-3000, vic

First posted