John Williamson: Northland roadwork site fatalities has traffic management soul searching

Police at Abbey Caves Rd following the death of Fulton Hogan employee Gabriel Fa’amausili, killed when he became trapped between a road roller and truck in January this year. Photo / Brodie Stone

OPINION

The contractors started on our job yesterday. The job is a new vehicle crossing from State Highway 14, which is required as part of the resource consent to create a new section adjacent to our private road.

The temporary traffic management only involves closing the state highway shoulder, as we are fortunate in being able to fully access the site from our private road. Interestingly, there have been a couple of innocuous roadside signs and road cones present on that highway for about a month now.

Someone on Monday, tossed them over our hedge signifying their lack of apparent purpose. Lonely road cones end up in curious places sometimes.

Two of the principles of the Code of Practice of Temporary Traffic Management (CoPTTM) are: “Providing an environment that is without risks to health and safety of road users and road workers must be an integral part of all activities carried out on the road,” and: “Clear and positive guidance must be provided for road users approaching, moving through and exiting the work site.”

So temporary traffic management is about protecting those who are working on roadside worksites from passing traffic.

Their presence and the extent to which they disrupt traffic movement in the interests of a safe workplace has its own set of controversies. Many in the industry would prefer complete road closure, as per the current Brynderwyns shutdown, in order to more efficiently get on with the job in the absence of passing traffic.

Clearly though, that is seldom desirable or practical from a general public viewpoint.

Bearing in mind the purpose of creating safe workplaces, it is significant to me that of the 15 road-related fatalities in Northland this year two of these have been inside those sites which have had temporary traffic management slung around them.

These have been horrible human tragedies that have been largely sanitised by the media and the details only show up in the police crash analysis reports, which are public information.

These read:

“15th January - Abbey Caves Rd, Whangārei District. Operating road construction team resealing roadway. Roller unit has driven backwards into truck which has been spreading metal onto the road. A construction worker on foot has been caught between the vehicles and died at the scene.

“18th March - Te Kopuru, Kaipara District. Road construction work carried out on West Coast Rd. A metal truck on site ran over the traffic control foreman at the worksite. Worksite was controlled by stop/go signs at each end. The foreman died at the scene.”

These are tragedies which make confronting reading and, if they had occurred on an industrial site, would be widely reported with public outrage and sympathies.

This is the second time in nine months that Abbey Caves Rd has featured. The last was in May last year when Whangarei Boys’ High student Karnin Petera drowned in a flooded cave during an outdoor education class trip. That incident was national news for weeks with the school being widely questioned, with Worksafe NZ involvement and sanctions being significantly reported.

Rāhui sign and flowers at the entrance to the Abbey Caves track after Karnin Petera died while on a school trip. Photo / Michael Cunningham

These Northland road fatalities are workplace accidents for which there was active temporary traffic management in place, controlling traffic movements around each site. Yet the public information is such that we have no appreciation of what happened. We seem to be so desensitised to the atrocious deaths and serious injuries on our roads that we no longer care.

No doubt, at some stage in the future, Worksafe NZ will have investigated and present reports with likely prosecutions and penalties. Lessons could be learned and practices changed. One of these might be that, just because you have temporary traffic management does not mean that you can be any less vigilant about the risks within the roadside workplace. These may not necessarily come up in a prescribed approach.

Temporary traffic management in New Zealand is going through a soul-searching process as it moves from a “one size fits all” prescribed approach, to a site-specific, risk-based approach.

According to one industry leader: “The risk-based approach takes practice, learning and humility. The only thing we are practised at in TTM is following CoPTTM, and that isn’t managing risk. It’s just using a set of rules and thinking we are managing risk.”

Let’s hope we can get a safer, more user-friendly approach and better public understanding and support for temporary traffic management as an outcome of better assessment and managing of the risks.