Worker fatally injured by trailer when truck reversed
Date of incident: November 2019
Notice of incident number: 2019178760029
Employer: Road construction company
Incident summary
In the works yard of a road construction company, the driver of a transport truck-and-trailer unit left the truck idling because it was cold that day. The driver walked to the back end of the trailer and saw that the airbags for the trailer suspension were not inflating. Suspecting there might be an ice plug in the trailer’s air lines, the driver went to the shop and told the foreman about the issue. Half an hour later, a worker came out of the shop, looked to confirm that no one was in the driver’s seat, and then crawled under the trailer to perform maintenance on the airbag suspension. While the worker was still underneath the trailer, the driver came out of the shop, climbed into the cab of the truck, and immediately started reversing. The worker under the trailer sustained fatal injuries.
Investigation conclusions
Cause
- Failure to control energy sources. The worker crawled under the trailer while the truck it was attached to was idling and unattended. Lockout or de-energization of the tractor-trailer unit was not performed, nor were any control measures implemented to isolate hazardous forms of energy, even though equipment to do so, such as lockout tags and wheel chocks, was available. The worker relied on a visual check that there was no one in the driver’s seat of the truck before climbing underneath the trailer. No matter how short in duration the work task would have been (heating up and removing the potential ice plug in the trailer’s air-bag suspension), de-energization measures should have been applied to the idling truck.
Contributing factors
- Inadequate lockout procedure. The employer’s lockout procedure was not specific to the equipment being maintained and did not discuss how to de-energize the equipment. The document suggested possible energy-isolating devices but didn’t describe the process for isolating the energy sources. Had a lockout procedure specific to vehicle maintenance been developed and adhered to, this incident might have been averted.