By R. Bruce Wright, CPCU
One type of claim regularly seen in a review of our Utility Program's auto liability loss runs can be rather easily prevented. These are the claims brought by third parties who have hit or been hit by an object that fell off of a utility truck!
If your company is like most, your line trucks and service trucks are stocked with a wide variety of items that are used in the course of ordinary work by your crews; items that are all too frequently not well secured. Often, other drivers make claims, members of the public who have had something hit their windshield, or who have run into something that they report had fallen or flown off a truck. While most such claims are minor, they can present a significant exposure for you. Let me relate a story I heard recently when visiting a member of our insurance program.
While making a consultation visit to a utility's safety manager, he and I began talking about post accident review and learning from mistakes. (You have likely had a conversation similar to this yourself.) This manager said that his company tried hard to learn from things that go wrong so as not to have the same type of accident again, and proceeded to tell me a story to illustrate his point. He told me that they had recently had an experience that happily led to only a minor claim, but one that could easily have been a disaster.
Like many utilities, they supplied their line truck crews with a number of orange cones used to warn the public away from work sites. The cones were carried on the trucks by the simple expedient of stacking them on an upright post mounted on the front bumper of the bucket trucks. A typical approach can be seen in the photo at the right. (This is not the truck or the even cooperative involved in this story, but is just an illustration of the issue.)
The safety manager told me that a crew was driving recently in a bucket truck, headed across a bridge, and the expansion joint where the paved bridge surface met the pavement on the ground had become uneven. When the truck's front tires hit the raised expansion joint it delivered a pretty good jounce to the truck, an experience your workers probably have frequently. Unfortunately, in this case the jounce was sufficient to bounce a cone up off the post and up into the slipstream. The cone flew up over the cab of the truck and was carried off to the left by the “bow wave” of air rushing along at the front of the truck, and it came down in the center of the oncoming lane of traffic.
It did not hit the pavement, but instead, it landed squarely in the center of the windshield of a car headed in the opposite direction, shattering the windshield and leaving the cone imbedded in it. Fortunately, the young driver managed to maintain control of his car and brought it to a stop on the edge of the road just past the end of the bridge. The extent of the damage was a broken windshield and a very startled driver. But as the safety manager observed, it could have been much worse. Think of the possibilities if this driver had lost control and gone off the bridge, or swerved left into the traffic behind the truck. At this cooperative, they reviewed the facts of the accident and decided that in the future, all cones will be secured with restraining cords whenever they were placed on the bumper posts. Good decision!
This is just one example of the potential hazards in this area. Another one you may run into is the use of a large water cooler kept on line trucks in hot weather. Here's an example of a typical situation. All coolers should be secured and not simply placed on the truck.
You also may have experienced situations where a line clamp, an anchor, or some similar small metal device has bounced free and hit a windshield. You can probably think of other items with similar potential, such as small hand tools etc. All such items should be secured before the truck proceeds out onto the public roads.
Many line trucks have storage bins for this purpose built into the body of the truck. But they only work if they are used. To ensure that they are used, you should institute a policy requiring every driver to do a visual inspection of his truck before operating it. This need not be a burdensome exercise, but merely a “walk around” with an eye to checking to see if any materials or tools have been left on or in the truck body, and not put away into some type of secured and covered storage carrier, and to assure himself that the coolers and cones are effectively tied down. This process could be made a regular part of a morning pre-trip inspection (Since you are already requiring that, aren't you?) and a part of your post-job site inspection before leaving any work site. (Oh, you don't have a post-job site inspection requirement? Well, that's another article, but you should!)
It's a fact of life in utility work that line trucks are often required to serve as rolling warehouses. But unlike the main warehouse, the trucks move around and therefore need to have everything secured before they venture out onto the public roads, so secure it first!