Lorry driver narrowly escapes death after metal platform smashes through his windscreen
tinyurl.com/nzq8dyx - metro.co.uk/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2cX0jgEChg
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Had a scaffold board fly off the top of a lorry at me once. I was in the v6 Audi so managed to close the gap and it sailed over the top of the car just bouncing on the fabric roof.
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The irony of that clip is that the lorry driver who indeed, did narrowly escape death, has to have training on how to secure a load which he often has to pay for himself.
The transit driver who didn't secure his load properly doesn't have to have any training whatsoever.
Pat
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Remember how they used to pack bricks on rigid lorries, so they leaned in at the sides?
One of them came round a bend towards me and I saw the load start to move. I thought that if I braked I'd get the lot, so I floored it into the bend and then had to brake to get round. I did a 180 to a stop (Vitesse with swing axles), but missed any bricks. The two cars behind were a totally different matter!
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As Pat will testify, DVSA (used to be VOSA) have become quite anal about load security.
Much of this is a good thing; loads do need to be secured to avoid incidents like the above but it seems now to have gone from one extreme to another. As in all things like this it ends up being a bit of a "one size fits all" situation; for example the time-honoured roping and sheeting tchnique is now virtually outlawed despite the fact that, done properly, you can damn near tip the trailer upside down and shake it and the load would not budge.
My own lorry carries palletised 25 kg bags of animal feeds which present their own problems; as you will appreciate the contents of the bags settle when in transit, and even if you strap them down very tightly with ratchet straps, by the time you get to your destination having driven up country lanes and farm tracks they's so loose as to be virtually useless in the event of a tip-over; the internal straps which you see hanging from the sides of lorry bodies would have stayed taut, but because the design does not meet the required parameters of load testing we cannot use them.
This accounts for much of the proliferation of lost ratchet straps which you see littering today's roads, sitting there with their hooks ipright waiting for an unsuspecting car or motorcycle tyre to puncture.
I actually asked a DVSA bod once what we should do to avoid this. His reply was that we should consider using boards on top of the pallets to spread the load. When I asked him how the company should secure the board to the pallet in order to avoid it slipping off and hitting me when I was unloading, he hadn't got an answer.
Once again, stuff designed and created by laboratory wallahs who've probably never been outside working in "real life". Grrrr.
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Often wondered why that happened.I try to stop to recover the straps when I see them in the road.
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I have had one of those straps picked up by the wheels of transit in front and thrown in the air at me.
Had to drive over a set of ladders on the m40 once, managed to straddle them under the car despite the fact they were still travelling and starting to separate.
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Oh yeah, all that awful roping stuff. There's a lot to it but who in their right mind could be bothered?
On reflection
Useful skill for a professional trucker. You don't want the load slipping off. Or anything along those lines but short of that, knowImean?
Learned a lot about this stuff, and helped with the roping too, in my hitching days. Learned a thing or two from those wise old truckers.
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The drivers at our place still do it. Quite often just a flatbed trailer with no curtain sides. All the stuff is ratchet strapped down, is that quite old fashioned now?
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>> The drivers at our place still do it. Quite often just a flatbed trailer with
>> no curtain sides. All the stuff is ratchet strapped down, is that quite old fashioned
>> now?
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No, that's actually the modern way. Back in the day drivers used ropes to secure the load and the sheet; nowadays the rope just holds the sheet in place.
As AC rightly says it's an old-fashioned and time-consuming business; I can do it after a fashion but I wouldn't want to do it regularly nowadays. Any driver of my generation, though, will tell you that a well roped and sheeted load just looks so right. Our old friend gordonbennett used to wax lyrical about it.
The point I was making was that it did work; believe it or not the reason for it being frowned upon these days is that the ropes haven't been load tested.
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Driving along the A34 near Abingdon about 10 years ago, the lorry in front of me ran over a 6ft wooden fence post and kicked it up into the air directly ahead of the car. I managed to get over to the right enough that it it glanced the top and side of the nearside wing, putting two big dents in it. Had I not, I have no doubt at all it would have come up the bonnet and straight through the windscreen.
I can still see it spinning in the air almost in slow-mo. It was terrifying.
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Unless a missile is actually hurled backwards in relation to the road, like a stone flung out of a wheel, then the 2-second distance rule should prevent all such incidents?
Obviously not ladders shot forwards off a lorry in the opposite direction.
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You never know what's round the next corner!! - zippy
