Health and Safety Laboratory, the training arm of the Health and Safety Executive, has launched a new course emphasising the importance of safe loading practices to fleet management professionals.

Over the course of the 2006/2007 work year, five deaths and 216 major injuries in the freight by road industry were caused by objects falling onto people. A further 946 people received injuries severe enough to keep them off work for over three days. Loads transported by road must be securely fastened to the vehicle that is carrying them. Once the vehicle is in motion, loads can move in any direction – even upwards, and even heavy loads can slide or topple in a moving vehicle.

Accelerating, braking and cornering can all cause the load to shift, and this in turn increased the chances of a rollover in transit, the load falling out on arrival at its destination, or someone being hurt trying to unload the unstable load. These are the two main types of loadbased accident – direct, such as rollover, the load falling out when the curtain is opened, or the load being ejected through the front bulkhead in transit, and indirect, where someone is hurt when part of the load falls on them during unloading or an accident occcurs due to someone having to get onto the trailer due to a poorly positioned load.

Nina Day is lead researcher at the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), and is behind the latest course to teach fleet and warehouse managers about the importance of safe loading. She says: “The key aim with the new training programme is to raise awareness of the issues with managers. Currently, there’s training available for drivers, and training available for loaders, but if those responsible for managing them don’t know why they’re doing it, then there’s no reason to expect the correct procedures to be followed – we need to nurture a level of understanding at management level as well as practical ability at driver and loader level. Our own research has shown that without an understanding of why something is being done, it’s very likely to not be done.”

Quite simply, the reason the correct procedures are important is to prevent roll overs and the attendant tail backs, and also to avoid accidents at the other end during unloading. Day also notes that the financial effect on companies can be significant where products are damaged in transit, and warns of significant levels of under-reporting, not only where accidents go unreported altogether, but also in circumstances where a slip or fall is directly attributable to, for example, moving to avoid a falling load, but goes reported as a simple fall rather than one due to poor loading.

Rather than the actual action of loading, then, where plenty of information is already available about working at height and correct lifting procedure, the new campaign seeks to address shifting loads and the damage they can cause: “What we’ve found is that communication is crucial,” Day explains.

“Communication between the customer, the haulier, the drivers. That’s why we’re trying to come in at the management level, with the people who have a broader view of the whole business, the people who are responsible for risk assessments. We’ve found that where this communication is taking place, a lot of the problems have been eliminated, so we want to encourage more of that.”

“Historically there's been an assumption that it’s all the driver’s responsibility, but this makes no sense. In the larger distribution centres, for example, the driver is unlikely to even see the load. It’s important then that managers are made aware of the issues and aware of why the vehicles need to be safely loaded.”

The new course debuts at the start of June, although interest has been such that a second course is already planned forJuly, and Day is particularly hopeful that smaller companies and even one-man bands may take up the opportunity to learn more: “Obviously we want the big companies to come along and learn about best practice, but a lot of the bigger hauliers and so on already have training programmes in place, and we don’t want to confine our efforts to them. We hope to also reach out to smaller organisations that don’t have the time or resources to run their own training programmes. We need to be targeting organisations across the board to really achieve our aims,” she explains.

So what exactly are those aims? Day attempts to summarise in a nutshell: “It can really all be summed up in the title of the campaign,” she says. “Protect yourself, protect your load. We want to protect those in the industry and members of the public, but also protect from vehicle damage and load damage. It’s in everybody’s interest to adopt best practice.

“It also became apparent in the course of our research that a lot of firms would like to adopt best practice, but fear it would put them at a commercial disadvantage. That’s an issue, and it’s not actually the case. If a company gets a reputation for having a lot of roll overs and a lot of damaged loads, that’s surely a greater commercial disadvantage than adopting some perfectly affordable measures to avoid them, and we need to get that message across.”

With the courses about to go live, Day and her organisation are set to do just that, and more information is available at http://www.hse.gov.uk/ haulage/load.htm