A dark pocket of risk
Are your lorry loads as secure as they should be? RSSB is working to shine a light on this dark pocket of risk.
Remember that old joke? A lorry carrying ten tons of onions crashed on the M4 westbound this morning. Police are urging motorists to find a hard shoulder to cry on.
But what if it wasn’t onions but steel bars? What if a lorry loaded at a railway yard hadn’t been subject to the same pre-departure checks we make for freight trains and left the site with the bars unsecured? And what if they moved in transit? They could fall off into traffic and cause a dreadful accident.
So often in rail, the risk will cut across many different parts of the industry. In cases like this, there are implications for road vehicle safety, freight, infrastructure maintenance, and workforce safety generally, when we think about the manual handling side of it.
Is this interface risk getting the attention that it deserves? RSSB is aware of a few incidents involving cable drums and even a transformer, but we don’t have much data because this kind of incident does not have to be reported under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, better known (to us, anyway) as RIDDOR.
At least, these sorts of incidents are not RIDDOR-reportable when a vehicle is being driven on the public highway. However, they are RIDDOR reportable if they occur at a private worksite and relate to loading/unloading vehicles. If an unsecure load causes an issue on the public highway, then these precursor events should be managed and therefore reported.
So, to help us gauge the magnitude of the issue, we urge you to report incidents like this through
your usual company reporting channels. That way, they should end up in our Safety Management Intelligence System (SMIS) and we can monitor them. The hope is that we might just avoid a road collision…or worse.
