Workplace transport: ruling out risk December

02 December 2006
Louis Wustemann

In the third of our series, Louis Wustemann considers training and instructions to promote safe behaviour around site vehicles.

Last month, HSW reported on three prosecutions of companies for workplace-transport-related accidents which resulted in the loss of a life, an employee losing the use of his legs and a customer at a builder's merchant breaking his ankle. The businesses involved landed fines totalling more than £150,000.

Though these cases differed in their details, what they had in common was that they all involved a lack of, or failure to follow, rules and procedures for the safe use of workplace vehicles.

Of the 70 people killed and 2,000 seriously injured in an average year in accidents involving vehicles in and around yards and depots, most involve some element of unsafe behaviour, as well as being attributable to poor site design or lack of vehicle maintenance, the subjects of the first two articles in this series (see Workplace transport: a place of safety and Workplace transport: machine guards).

Adequate training, clear procedures and strictly enforced rules are all essential to stopping pedestrians being hit by or falling from vehicles, or being hit by objects falling from vehicles, whether they are site-based machines, such as fork-lift trucks, or road-going vehicles such as articulated lorries on company sites. Once physical hazards like unsafe layouts and badly specified vehicles have been removed, unsafe actions are what maintain the level of risk.

The HSE's "routemap" to health and safety in workplace transport, currently in development - though it might not still have bear name when it goes online next year - will set benchmarks for training drivers and site operatives in safe working in and around vehicles.

Under instruction

The most obvious way to enable consistent safe behaviour among drivers is to train them thoroughly. Even stating this might seem like teaching site operators' grandmothers to suck eggs, but when the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), the HSE's research arm, surveyed 500 businesses using workplace transport, 26% reported not providing any training to drivers - leaving them in breach of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) 1998. More than one-third of the 303 who used forklifts in the HSL poll provided no accredited training for operators.

The training drivers should receive is outlined in the Approved Code of Practice (AcoP) for fork-lift-truck driving (Rider-operated Lift Trucks: Operator Training L117, available from www.hsebooks.co.uk) first introduced in 1988 and updated in 1999. The ACoP introduced a formal three-stage training model:

basic training: a course of around five days for novices followed by a test covering the basic skills needed to operate lift vehicles safely
specific job training: including knowledge of the operating principles and controls of the vehicle they will use and introduction to the loads and materials they will normally handle
familiarisation: details of site layout, company safety rules, emergency procedures and any personal protective equipment they will need to wear.

This last stage should be carried out on the job under close supervision.

The ACoP may apply only to lift trucks but HSE inspectors will expect to see evidence of similar training for operators of any workplace vehicles (see below), plus refresher training as and when a risk assessment calls for it.

Drivers' safety training will naturally focus on safe management of vehicles (such as the instability of unladen forklifts when cornering, covered in last month's article), but it must also take in the safety aspects of the materials they will be handling and the rest of the environment, since the safest behaviours are sometimes far from the obvious ones.

Philip Pinel, managing director of racking safety consultants and trainers Storage Equipment Safety Service (SESS), offers the example of a forklift driver dislodging goods on high racking above the truck - say by striking the racks lower down with the forks. Their instinctive reaction would be to run out of the way, says Pinel. But the safest option is counterintuitive: to stay put. "They will be protected by the truck's cage and the mast," he says, "whereas if they run for it, they will most likely be crushed."

A thorough risk assessment of all parts of a driver's work will provide plenty of safety tips to build into training courses. This may even come down to advice on mounting and dismounting from vehicles. In the last feature we looked at the importance of specifying vehicles with the correctly placed handgrips and footholds, but even with the right equipment many people will be tempted to take short-cuts. "In the LGV industry you'll see them jumping down from the cab in their 20s," says Colin Chatten, senior policy adviser in the HSE's Workplace Transport Team, "and by the time they get to their 50s they are racked with arthritis."

Nick Purkis, UK fleet risk manager at removal giant Pickfords, agrees: "People jumping in and out of cabs can cause a lot of damage."

On the other hand, he says, it is difficult to enforce safe behaviour in this area. "So what we have done is rather than say to staff, 'you mustn't jump out of cabs', because we know they are going to do it, we have discouraged them from jumping then said 'if you really must then this is the way to land, by bending your knees to absorb the shock'."

Rob Miles, HSE principal specialist inspector in charge of human factors, notes that on-the-job training is often more of an ideal than a reality unless enough time is built into the work schedules of those involved. "You have to schedule in enough slack to allow someone to stop what they are doing and walk over to someone else to show them how to do the job," he says.

Foot warriors

Safe behaviour by drivers is critical if they are to protect themselves and others on work sites, but what about training those they work around? The primary control measures to safeguard workers on foot, such as office and warehouse staff is through physical segregation from vehicles using barriers, or by strictly enforcing rules that they keep to separate marked routes (see below). But in the smallest sites, or as a belt-and-braces measure on larger ones, it may be only possible to reduce the risk of workers on foot adding to the "struck-by" injury statistics by training them in the characteristics and limitations of the vehicles that use the site.

"It would be good to make people aware what it's like to reverse an artic because they tend to walk behind them," says Ian Smith, transport adviser at the Freight Transport Association (FTA), referring to the notorious blind spot behind articulated units.

Head of the HSE's Workplace Transport Team Carol Grainger says the peculiarities of lift-truck manoeuvring would be another good topic for instruction where they can't avoid mixing with foot traffic. She says that with rear-wheel drive models, "if you step out of the way of where it would be going if it was a car, you are not actually putting yourself in safety. Unless you look at which way the wheels are pointing you have absolutely no idea which way the truck is going to move."

David Ellison, chief executive of the Fork Lift Truck Association (FLTA), says that general awareness of the characteristics of forklifts is almost non-existent. "You'd be amazed at the number of people who try and stop a fork truck by putting their foot down in front of it," he says. "And behold, their foot is a chunk of meat."

This way only

For workers to know the behaviour that is expected of them, they need a clear set of safety rules for site transport. Examples of generic rules are:

Only authorised drivers are allowed to operate workplace vehicles.
Pedestrians must wear high-visibility vests and keep to marked routes.
No reversing vehicles unless accompanied by a trained banksman.
No exceeding the site speed limit.
No blocking pedestrian or vehicle routes.
Drivers must wear seatbelts.

Like the need for training, some of these might seem like statements of the obvious, but in practice they are likely to need frequent restatement and enforcement.

David Ellison says that a survey of members of the FLTA's Safe User Group -which comprises 120 businesses using lift trucks - found that drivers wearing seatbelts were a rarity. "There's no doubt in our minds that there are something like 90% of operators not wearing seatbelts," he says, "and that's a area of real concern. The evidence is that on a day-to-day basis people are breaking noses, dislocating shoulders from small collisions just by not wearing seatbelts."

Most sites will also need rules specific to their layout and business activity, or for specific risky activities, such as coupling and uncoupling vehicles (the subject of a new HSE code of practice, produced with the Society of Operations Engineers, available free from www.soe.org.uk/newsitem.php?id=463).

Rob Miles says site-specific rules are most likely to work if they are well researched. "Management often set the rules and enforcement ahead of working out if you can do the job that way," he notes. "So when people break them, they are really rescuing the management from the fact that the way things are organised is wrong."

The alternative, he says, is to consult with operators and take advantage of their experience: "You should get a set of procedures you all agree on and along the way you'll probably get suggestions for better site and equipment design that the management have never known about."

Assuming you have a set of fair, workable rules designed to ensure site workers' safety around vehicles, you still need to find ways to make them stick. Rob Miles says that draconian punishments for breaking rules should be reserved for persistent offenders and that the best way to ensure compliance is to keep picking up infringements and pressing home the importance of keeping to the regulations.

Miles warns that consistency of behaviour at all levels is critical, since the message that site safety rules are flexible often comes from the top: "If one of the senior managers comes in, parks his car and walks straight across the 'no pedestrians' area, your chance of enforcing that rule among the rest of the workforce is low."

Ensuring that site users stick to safe procedures is particularly difficult where they are visitors - whether drivers or pedestrians - since, if they work for someone else, the usual disciplinary disincentives are not available to you. More creative thinking is called for to make compliance worth their while (if self-preservation is not enough of a carrot).

"I've delivered to large sites," says the FTA's Ian Smith, "where the instruction is 'you go and park in that square, the forklift driver will tell you when you can get out of your cab' - as simple as that. If you ever get out of your cab, the forklift driver retires to the back of the site and won't move till you get back in."

Rob Miles offers another example of self-employed lorry drivers in the sawmilling industry. "They can overload tree trunks onto their lorries in such a way that when they get to the sawmill they are very difficult to unload," he explains. "But of course that means they make fewer journeys and make more money. The injuries occur to the sawmill workers unloading. They tried and tried to get safe-loading guidelines and failed." He says the answer was to explain to the suppliers that they were going to enforce a safe-loads policy, then to give the securitiy guards at the mill entrance a set of photographs of properly stacked lorries. "They gave the guards very clear instructions: 'if it doesn't look like any of these pictures, turn them away'. It gives the security staff something to do and the drivers couldn't argue. Within a couple of weeks they were turning up with lorries that were safely loaded."

Crimewatch

At a site with a model safety culture, employees will police both themselves and each other, pulling up colleagues whenever they see unsafe behaviour. For the majority of workplaces that fall short of this ideal, monitoring is needed to see that infringements do not become common practice.

At Pickfords, Nick Purkis says a team of health and safety officers tours the company's sites making spot checks on driver and site safety. Drivers are also subject to random drug and alcohol testing and he has even invited police officers to depots with speed guns to verify that drivers were keeping to the site speed limits. "We found few infringements," says Purkis, "but it sends a message to staff we are serious."

Spot checks will help keep people on their toes, but the HSE strongly advocates "active supervision" with someone in the workplace tasked with monitoring operators at all times. Colin Chatten notes that the development of teamworking and self-managed groups in manufacturing and distribution since the 1980s did away with the traditional foreman/supervisor role in many cases. "That took away the presence of a figure of authority who said 'you must not do that'," Chatten observes. "You need someone there to say 'that's not good enough, you are not coming up to scratch'."

"In the end someone has to keep an eye on what is going on, communicate to the management and the workforce, and reinforce the procedures day-to day," agrees Rob Miles. "In the absence of someone in the workplace doing that, things run out of control after a while. That's the role of the supervisor and they need training for it.

"You need supervisors who have time for that part of the job, who are not always tied up countersigning overtime sheets or answering email from the management."

Jonathan Handley, managing director of Bendi Driver Training, says lack of management points out some types of workplace transport activity explicitly require supervision.

"It became law in PUWER 1998 that anyone supervising forklift operation needs to have appropriate and adequate training," he says. "They need to know what they are looking at." Few organisations, he believes, are putting supervisors through even the most basic training, which weakens an important safety check, since "any laziness by the operator can be underwritten by the vigilance of the supervisor."

Visitors welcome

"Someone new to your site immediately becomes the most vulnerable person on that site," observes Carol Grainger at the HSE.

If this is the case, then it follows that making safety procedures clear to new arrivals is critical.

For sites with staffed entrances, it may be simply a matter of giving the security staff responsibility for briefing visitors on foot or in vehicles on site procedures and handing out written instructions or high-visibility vests where necessary.

Where there is no entrance security, a reasonable substitute is large clear signage stating speed limits and directions for visitors to report inside for further instructions.

But sites taking frequent deliveries may be able to pre-arm visiting drivers with site safety information. Sending safety rules, unloading procedures and maps (even directions to the site itself) ahead, along with orders or other documentation, will give drivers a chance to familiarise themselves with the rules before they arrive at your gates.

This provision of information ahead of time can help close a gap that the HSE believes contributes to many workplace transport accidents associated with deliveries: a disconnection between suppliers, carriers and recipients, all of whom have linked safety duties.

Whether you send information ahead or give it out on site, a picture may be worth a thousand words according to the HSE's Rob Miles. "I'm a believer in using less writing and more diagrams," he says. "I think we are going to see a growth in that area."

Graphic instructions will communicate with operators and visitors whatever their literacy level, he suggests. Pictorial instructions also have the advantage that they overcome any language barriers and are particularly useful at sites with a throughput of intercontinental vehicles. Miles points out that artistic skills are not even needed. "You can use a digital camera to photograph your own site," he says. "Then use some photographic software to create a comic-strip series, then put it on the wall or put it on a laminated sheet and give it to people."