The milk tanker truck overturned on State Highway 1 between Kaiwaka and Te Hana. Photo / NZTA
The dashcam footage of the truck crash at Topuni two weeks ago, is sobering.
We were on a road trip to New Plymouth that day, and were about 10 cars behind the crash.
Without knowing what had happened, we turned around and continued on through Mangawhai.
By the time we reached Wellsford, the photos were all over social media, with the dashcam footage emerging the next day.
In some ways clipping a milk tanker and trailer unit was both unfortunate and fortunate.
It only tipped the unit over and blocked the road. Impacting a passenger car could have had fatal consequences.
Those confronting pictures of an out-of-control articulated truck on the road, reminded us of our own experience, some 25 years ago in Melbourne.
We were on a road trip from Melbourne to Adelaide in a rental car.
We had accommodation booked at Penola, around halfway there. We were on the road driving the freeway around 8.15am.
We were in the outside lane driving alongside an articulated truck. The truck beside us moved over, and kept on moving over, dragging us into and along the side barrier.
The sight of the truck wheels grinding away at the front end of the car still haunts us today, as the windscreen exploded and we were dragged about 50 metres along the barrier.
Apparently, the truck driver was avoiding a rogue truck from an emerging lane and we were just in the way.
We looked at each other" “Are you okay?” and climbed out the driver’s window, as the smell of fuel fumes was ominous.
We were able to extract our bags, the police took us back to the rental car company, and amazingly, we were back on the road in a new car, by 11.30am.
The 500km drive along the Great Ocean Rd did not do the scenic road justice, with the sombre mood in the car.
It’s a scary thing to be confronted by a 4.3m high, 40 tonne heap of flying metal on the road – especially when it is coming right at you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Truck drivers have a huge responsibility, most particularly relating to driver distraction and fatigue, when behind the wheel.
In this respect, heavy truck drivers have some stringent rules slung around their work hours.
They need to write these hours into a logbook, take a 30-minute break every 5.5 hours, and work no more than 13 hours a day. These rules are strictly policed.
These rules cause stress, unwanted delays, frustration about when and where these breaks can be taken, and they sometimes cause conflict with animal welfare protections.
The issue is driver fatigue, and the potential consequences of that.
In the last couple of years, a group of lower North Island livestock transport operators have undertaken a trial, with NZTA’s permission, to introduce some flexibility by throwing out the logbooks and mandated 30-minute breaks and changing these to multiple 10-minute breaks.
This is in order to manage driver fatigue in a more holistic way.
Each 10-minute break, also involves drivers cognitive testing through the Alertmeter app, which communicates to the driver and management, the driver’s fitness to drive.
The trial has been going a couple of years now, and will continue for some time to provide evidence of improved safety outcomes and more efficient transport.
Technology is also being developed to both monitor and alert truck drivers and their employers by using in-cab sensors, which respond in real time to driver’s level of distraction and fatigue, by sounding audio alarms and creating seat vibrations.
There are attendant issues of invasion of privacy and system reliability as well as cost, as these new systems bed down.
The real problem of heavy vehicle driver distraction and fatigue, was impressively captured by dashcam at Topuni two weeks ago, and gives ample evidence of the potential outcome when things all go wrong.
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