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Managing risk

Employer's policy failures led to driver's death and $800K fine

A freight driver had to uncouple a refrigerated trailer from a truck while standing in an active traffic lane of a road with a 100km speed limit. What could go wrong?

04 Apr 2024

Gaby Grammeno

Contributor

The driver was employed by a business involved in the transport of temperature-controlled freight across Australia.

Drivers were required to 'swap trailers' with other workers at designated locations. This task consisted of uncoupling the trailer attached to their truck and then coupling the other worker's trailer to their truck, before leaving the designated location. This was known as conducting a 'changeover'.

The process of unhooking the trailer took about 10 minutes. The controls to unhook the trailer were on the driver's side behind the cabin. The driver was also required to walk around the vehicle to check the tyres and the temperature of the refrigerated trailer. One of the drivers had to cross the road on foot or by doing a three-point turn in the truck to exchange paperwork with their changeover driver.

The incident

On 6 July 2021, a changeover was to take place on a section of Macleay Valley Way in Clybucca, New South Wales. Changeovers there had previously taken place at a BP service station, but it had stopped operating in 2016. Since then, workers have conducted changeovers on the shoulders of the road about 370 metres long adjacent to the closed service station.

Shortly after midnight, a driver walked out into the northbound lane of the road to exchange paperwork with the other driver. He was hit by a truck driven at about 75 km/h, and killed.

SafeWork NSW investigators found that:

Before the incident, the company had not assessed the WHS risks of changeovers, nor had it conducted a site inspection to identify hazards at the Clybucca changeover location or other sites.
Workers were aware of the risks of changeovers at that location – specifically, that the site was too crowded – and had verbally reported those risks to the employer.
Drivers reported that the road was rough and potholed at the site. The lighting was poor, and the shoulders were soft. There was no safe area to pull over, and they had to park partly on the sealed bitumen and partly on the dirt.
There was very little room, as many trucks conducted a changeover in the area – 11 trucks were parked on either side of the road in the changeover area at the time of the incident.
Workers had to walk onto the road when entering and exiting their trucks as there was no space to walk on the shoulder when the truck was parked.
Noise levels were high due to traffic on the road, the trucks' engines and the refrigerated trailers' running noise. Workers often had to yell to hear each other over the noise.
Although the drivers were trained and assessed in the task of coupling and uncoupling trailers, they were not given any training on the hazards of working in close proximity to vehicular traffic during changeovers, nor were they given relevant risk control measures.
The information and training provided by the company concerned the safety and security of the trailers, not worker's personal safety.

SafeWork concluded that the employer had contravened work health and safety laws and decided to prosecute. The case was heard in the District Court of NSW.

In court

The prosecution submitted that the company had failed to take one or more of the available reasonably practicable measures to eliminate or minimise the risks to the driver's safety. There was no safe system of work for conducting changeovers; the company had not provided adequate information, instruction or training, nor had it reliably provided and enforced the wearing of appropriate high-visibility clothing.

The driver who died was not wearing a hi-vis vest or shirt at the time of the incident. Though the company's policy said drivers were to be provided with and wear hi-vis clothing, compliance varied and some workers had not been provided with hi-vis vests with reflective strips.

Photographic evidence showed how close the parked trucks were to passing traffic during changeovers. Due to the lack of space, the drivers were effectively standing on the active lane of the road.

District Court Judge Wendy Strathdee found that the location was not suitable for drivers to undertake a changeover task safely. She accepted that the risk would have been minimised if the business had adequate control measures in place and provided proper training and instruction.

The risk of being struck by vehicular traffic on the road was obvious and should have been anticipated by the company. The failure to take reasonably practicable measures to protect drivers from the risk of being struck by a vehicle when swapping trailers had resulted in the death of a family's breadwinner and ongoing grief and financial difficulties for his dependants.

The employer was convicted of failing to comply with its health and safety duty, thereby exposing the deceased driver and other workers to a foreseeable risk of death or serious injury, contrary to ss 32 and 19(1) of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011. The business was ordered to pay a fine of $800,000 plus SafeWork's costs.