A new year celebration party by a group of Lautoka Sugar Mill workers turned into tragedy when one of them was crushed to death under a sugar train.
According to an article published by The Fiji Times on January 1, 1985, the victim was 38-year-old Filipe Sadrugu of Navutu Settlement near Lautoka.
Sadrugu, who had earlier phoned his boss at the Lautoka Sugar Mill to say he was too drunk to come to work, lay down to “rest” on the tramline near the Navutu roundabout on the Queens Rd just outside Lautoka.
A locomotive towing carts of mill mud to Field 40 ran over him, crushing him to death.
Grieving family members told this newspaper that Sadrugu, who was a diesel fireman at the Lautoka mill, had been celebrating the New Year with friends just before the accident.
He was scheduled to begin work at 7.30am, but called the foreman at the mill to say he was too drunk to report for duty. He then accompanied his friends to buy more beer.
When the group reached the tramline, Sadrugu told his friends to go on without him to buy the beer, and he would wait for them at the tramline.
He then lay down to sleep on the tramline while his friends went to buy beer, the newspaper’s sources said.
Sadrugu had not slept throughout the night and was sound asleep even before his friends left. A FSC locomotive, pulling 50 carts of mill mud from the mill to Field 40, ran over him.
He was lying across the tramline, and the locomotive driver did not see him until it was too late, sources said. The driver then stopped the locomotive and called the sugar mill for help.
Several mill workers arrived shortly after and helped pull Sadrugu out from under the locomotive.
One of the mill workers said he died while being rushed to the Lautoka Hospital.
Sadrugu was survived by his wife, Maraia, and four children.
Another FCS employee, Mohammed Ishaq, 26, was killed in a similar accident when he was crushed under two rail carts at Lomawai, near Sigatoka.
Ishaq, a pointsman, was trapped under the carts when he went to check something.
Another man, Iliaseri Navosailagi, had his right leg amputated after a locomotive ran over him while he was sleeping on a tramline at Lomawai on December 15.
Navosailagi was returning home from a pre-Christmas party when he lay down on the tramline and fell asleep.
