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Copyright © 1999 FleetWatch magazine and FleetWatch On-Line. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior written permission from the publishers. Views published are not necessarily those of the publishers. |
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October
1999
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September was a horror month on South Africa's roads with one coach accident in which 27 British tourists were killed catapulting us onto the world's stage as a nation sadly lacking in the area of road safety. While we await the outcome of the various inquiries into the accidents, FleetWatch regards the over 90 deaths and 300 injuries as a big wake-up call to the trucking industry and is taking action now to try improve matters writes publisher and managing editor, Patrick O'Leary. Mayhem! That's about the most polite description I can find in the thesaurus to tag onto the carnage we have seen on our roads over the past month or so. It was disaster after disaster and as heaps of rolling metal crashed and plunged off our roads, the body count went up and up. The hospital wards filled as the blood spilled. I don't intend to go into all the gory details. That's already been dealt with. The whole world saw the wrecks - vehicles and bodies - that resulted from this trail of carnage and especially from the Long Tom Pass coach accident in which 27 British tourists were killed. What a bloody joke we all are. If the consequences weren't so tragic, we would be the biggest laugh around. Unfortunately, the British do not have a sense of humour - or a sense of tolerance - when 27 of their senior citizens are wiped out on our roads. The Long Tom Pass incident was regarded as a national disaster in Britain with every media outlet giving it the front page treatment throughout that week. "They've gone ballistic over there on this one," I was told by a BBC correspondent after a press conference held at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. That was the conference where the Minister of Transport, Dullah Omar, announced a number of measures to be taken following the disaster, one of which was to lower the speed limit for buses from 120kph to 100kph. Inigo Gilmore, a correspondent for both Sky TV News and the Sunday Telegraph, was one of the journalists tasked with feeding information to a hungry British press. FleetWatch spoke to him after things had settled down to gauge the effect this disaster had on South Africa's image abroad. Negative coverage for South Africa "It was a major story in the UK and resulted in extremely negative coverage for South Africa," he says. "Stories of the accident itself, the dead, the survivors and their families were emblazoned all over the British press. This was backgrounded with lots of analytical stuff about South Africa's road safety record, the problems on the roads and the reasons for the country's dismal road safety record. What came out as a general theme is the lack of a coherent policy on road safety issues and a failure on the part of the Government to deal with road safety in a determined and methodical way." He added that the ramifications of such messages on the tourism industry could be dire. "The South Africa government is targeting tourism as a major growth industry and has to realize that if they can’t ensure the safety of tourists on the road, tourists will not visit this country. In fact, it's not just on the roads that they need to reassure potential visitors. It's involves all safety issues, including crime. The South Africa government has to meet its words with actions and the general message that went out is that there is a lack of action behind the words." From a personal point of view, he found it abhorrent that it took the death of 28 tourists to get the government to act. "That's a terrible indictment against the government's determination to make the roads safe for its own people, never mind tourists. It's unbelievable really." Another observation Gilmore made during his research was that there exists in this country a general lack of transparency in terms of getting to the bottom of the causes of these accidents. He cited as an example a phone call he made to a chief executive trying to get confirmation of reports he had received that the same bus model had been involved in accidents before. "I was trying to gauge whether there was an inherent technical problem and this guy slammed the phone down on me. It seems to me that everything is hidden and that's not good for making improvements. If it is suspected that there are technical problems, manufacturers owe it to the public to remove the buses from the roads and fix whatever may be wrong - if indeed there is anything wrong. To try avoid the issue and evade the questions by slamming down the phone is hardly an appropriate response when 27 people have just died." He's right you know! In South Africa, we haven’t treated the death of our citizens with anywhere near the same scale of radical reaction as we did the death of the British tourists. We haven't treated our own mass death accidents as national disasters. Harsh summation? Not so, and especially when one considers that in the 20 day period leading up to the Long Tom Pass accident - from September 6th to September 25th - six major bus accidents took place in which a total of 42 people were killed, 30 were seriously injured and 202 slightly injured. I can’t remember any of these accidents soliciting the same shock treatment as did the Long Tom Pass incident. I might have missed it but I can’t remember any special sittings of Cabinet or major Government pronouncements on actions to be taken to improve the situation. It was only on September 27th that things started moving - and it took the deaths of tourists to spur the movement. I wonder if the accident that occurred the next day - on September 28th - at King Williamstown in which 14 people were serious injured and seven slightly injured would have solicited the same response. Or maybe it would have taken the one that occurred a few days later on October 3rd when 19 people were killed, 47 seriously injured and 13 slightly injured in a bus accident between Bisho and Butterworth; or would it have been the one that occurred when a truck hit a stationary coach on the N1 on October 7th when nine people - eight adults and a child - were killed and 18 seriously injured? Inbetween all this, there were also the normal spate of road deaths from taxi and other accidents. The turning point Given that the 44 deaths prior to September 28th were not enough to solicit drastic response, I must unfortunately assume that it would not have come from the accidents that occurred after the 28th. So that leaves the turning point at the foot of the Long Tom Pass on September 27th. That's the day FleetWatch will put down in its history book as the day the government, the industry, the public and the world woke up to the harsh reality that South Africa is the pits when it comes to road safety. So what do we do about it? Where do we go from here? Well, FleetWatch is taking a stance - based not only on the Long Tom Pass accident, or any of the other bus accidents that occurred over this gory period, but based on a long track record of mayhem on our roads. And based on discussions we have had with truck operators over a long period of time and who are now 'gatvol'. Before we outline the stance we're taking, let us state loud and clear that while the spotlight over the past few months or so has fallen on the bus and coach industry, this should not lull truck operators into a false sense of complacency. Remember that in some of the accidents, trucks were involved and in one case, a truck was directly blamed for the accident. Remember also that the accident on October 7th took place between a bus from Vaal Triangle company and a truck from Highway Carriers. The bus driver, Samson Zonda, told police that while driving, he had heard a loud noise in the engine, that the bus started to jerk and that the engine later died. It was then he came to rest on the side of the road. The truck from Highway Carriers hit the bus from behind on the right hand side and the impact pushed the bus off the road. The truck driver and his co-driver, along with seven others, were killed. Investigations into the accident are in progress. I highlight this incident not to apportion blame but rather to illustrate that trucks are also in the net. Trucks would hit the headlines daily To put the truck factor into context, FleetWatch has stated before, and does so again now, that if trucks carried people instead of goods, this industry would make the headlines on an almost daily basis. Let's cite just two examples I have personally witnessed that could be related to the above accident as well as to the British tourist accident.. The first occurred on the N3 when a truck carrying bags of sugar hit the back of another truck parked in the emergency lane. The truck cab was a wreck and miraculously the driver escaped with minor cuts - as did the driver of the parked truck who was sitting in his cab at the time. The rear end of the refrigerated container which was hit was smashed. Luckily, it was only butter that was splattered around the place - not brains. There was also sugar all over the road. Translate that into the coach/truck accident described above and if it were people being carried, it would have made the headlines. It's only when the price of butter or sugar goes up that these commodities hit the news. Take as a second example an accident I recently came across on the way to Hartebeestpoort Dam. A truck had gone off the road and plunged about 30m to the bottom of a steep ravine. The driver, again miraculously, was unhurt but the goods he was carrying on the flat deck - dog food, cans of food and other goodies - were lying strewn at the bottom of the ravine. I climbed down that ravine and thought at the time that the split cans of food would have been split skulls were it been people he was hauling. Luckily, cans and dog-cubes do not make the front pages - but imagine if they did.. Multiply these two accidents by the hundreds of others that have involved trucks and you will quickly be jolted out of any form as complacency that might set in. As a matter of interest, to illustrate this point with actual statistics, FleetWatch tried to get a consolidated report from the authorities on the number of truck accidents that had occurred throughout the country over the same period as the recent spate of bus accident, namely, throughout September. Can you believe that there is nowhere we could source this information? Sure it's all there - but it's lying around the country rather than being channeled into a central data base. It seems that it is only when the Arrive Alive offices are up and running during peak traffic periods that consolidated reports become quickly available. Maybe I missed some source but it seems there is no central base from which we can draw national truck accident statistics - unless they are historical. There's a big fault here and it relates to a simple management principle: If you can't measure it, you can’t manage it. It was only through the kindness of Superintendent Rob Askew of the National Division for Crime Prevention and Response Services of the South Africa Police Services that I was able to get the table of bus accidents accompanying this article. He went the extra mile and gathered the information from various sources and put it together for FleetWatch. Many thanks for that. The intention of getting the information on truck accidents for that period was to highlight in tangible form that it is not just the bus industry that needs to catch a wake up, but also very much the truck industry. The bottom line is that we view the recent spate of tragic accidents as a big wake-up call to all who operate vehicles on our roads - and we are responding to that wake-up call. The FleetWatch stance Although FleetWatch has, since its inception, had a strong underlying safety ethic in its editorial policy highlighting aspects such as driver health, maintenance procedures and other vital inputs, the fact that some 90 people died and over 300 were injured in just over a month tells us it is not enough. We have to go further and this where FleetWatch has now adopted - and will be promoting on an on-going basis - a stance which states that: The solutions to safety issues and professional conduct as pertains to trucks on the roads will not come about as a result of law enforcement or any other outside input but from within the industry itself via transport operators adopting stringent and disciplined policies of self policing and voluntary compliance to the law as it exists - as well as to good corporate citizenship and sound business practices. The adoption of this stance is broadly based on the following points: 1) That we can forget about any form of effective law enforcement at this stage of South Africa's development. It hardly exists out there on the roads. Capacity and resources are sadly lacking and that's a fact. I recall John Schnell of the Kwa-Zulu Traffic Authority saying some two years ago that for his department to patrol the roads on a 24-hour a day basis, he would require an additional 700 staff members - and he had no chance of getting either the money or the people to achieve that. Given these circumstances, FleetWatch will, however, constructively push and work with the authorities in whatever way we can to improve the situation. 2) That we believe there is effective legislation in place but without effective policing and enforcement of the laws, the legislation is less than useless. 3) That driver training is sadly lacking in the industry and that the driver training profession in South Africa has failed the country by failing to push for the prioritisation of professional and on-going driver training. 4) That medical screening of drivers has been largely ignored by operators leaving many medically unfit drivers steering the wheels of the country. In the adoption of this stance, FleetWatch will also endeavour to uphold a responsible attitude when tackling issues of concern to the industry. FleetWatch will not push panic button proposals based on emotive reaction without evidential foundation. To illustrate an example of what we mean by this, while we commend the Minister of Transport for the decisive and quick action taken following the Long Tom Pass accident, we disagree with the lowering of the speed limit from 120kph to 100kph for buses and coaches - and also stand against the suggested lowering of the speed limit for trucks from 80kph to goodness knows what. While lowering speeds might seem an obvious and immediate solution, there are long term implications for both the tourist and the freight industry. On the tourist side, this will serve to annoy visitors by making journeys pretty intolerable. The consequences on the road freight side are more serious in that it would reduce the productivity of South Africa at a time when we’re desperately trying to get productivity up to compete on the global market. The way vehicles move is linked to productivity. Germany, for example, moves at very high speed, very productively. So speed, while an easy target to focus on, is not the core problem. Enforcement of the current limits will go a long way towards improving the situation but we contend that the current speed limits are not being enforced so what effect will a lower limit have on improving the situation. It could also rebound when more drivers fall asleep behind their wheels at those speeds. Driver fatigue is already a major cause of accidents and lowering the speed limit on long hauls is not going to do anything to improve this. It will, in fact, worsen the situation. The first driver I spoke to on this subject - one from Highway Carriers who was relaxing in his cab at Tyco's workshops in Wadeville - shook his head in dismay and disbelief when I asked him what he thought of the suggestion of a lower speed limit for his truck. "No, we can’t do that. The trips will be too long and the drivers will fall asleep too much. We already spend too much time on the road," was his response. FleetWatch agrees with him. Invitation to Minister On this point, please may I extend an open invitation to the Minister of Transport to travel in a truck on a normal trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town to get a hands-on feel for what drivers have to contend with out there on the road. I'm serious! Minister Omar, as Minister of Transport, please come and see what the drivers are facing out there and where their problems lie. You might not like travelling all the way at 80kph but the food's not too bad. The speed limit of 80kph for trucks is pretty much an international norm. It allows for safe and productive operations without compromising on road safety issues. There are other factors which one can look at to effect improvements. Issues such as driver fatigue, driver health, lack of vehicle maintenance, the general absence of effective driver training - these are just a few focus areas. There's always a cascade of events that precedes an accident and pinning an accident on one item only is dangerous. It does not fix the real issues. The 80kph is, in FleetWatch's opinion, the last area to look at in order to gain ground. Of course, because of the lack of enforcement, trucks do go over the limit and that is why FleetWatch will push for voluntary compliance among operators. Look, it's not easy to publicly state that we have no faith in law enforcement but it's true - we don't. Not at this stage. Not until the law enforcers prove they can enforce the law. At this stage we have our doubts. So it's up to the industry. It's over to you guys! Do we accept the current situation and let the standards continue to slide? Do we wait until a poorly maintained truck hits a busload of British tourists or do we get up now and do something about getting pride, safety and good business practices back into the equation? FleetWatch says let's do something about it. Just think, it could have been your wife or child who got killed on October 7th when that truck hit that bus. And when that happens - who cares whose fault it is. Your loss is the real tragedy. The Sky TV News and Sunday Telegraph correspondent Inigo Gilmore stated above that the South Africa government has to meet its words with actions. The same applies to FleetWatch. In this respect, we will kick off our new stance by highlighting various opinions in this issue on the bus accidents, especially related to brake failures and driver training. Code of Conduct and Ethics We are also in the process of forming what, for want of a better name, we will at this stage call the FleetWatch Prestige Truckers Club - membership of which will be on a voluntary basis and open to all truck operators who wish to comply to a voluntary Code of Conduct and Ethics which is currently being drafted. Apart from safe practices, it will also embrace the promotion of the trucking industry as a strategic sector which cannot deliver quality service by being exploited on aspects like rates which has forced many into criminal practices like overloading. As the name implies, it is a prestige industry of which all who are associated with it want to be proud of. Without going into all the details here, FleetWatch has approached a number of operators with the idea and has been met with favourable response. The idea was, in fact, originally suggested to FleetWatch by a Cape Town operator. We also approached Kwa-Zulu Natal's John Schnell with the broad concepts in order to get an indication of some form of on-the-road benefits for members of the club and he enthusiastically supported the idea stating in principle that his staff would view members of such a club with favour out on the road. We will, once details are finalised, approach other traffic authorities. I also mentioned the idea some time ago to Nazi La, head of the National Roads Agency Board whose big headache is the damage caused to the roads by overloaded trucks. He too welcomed the idea and indicated full support in principle pending further details. I also mentioned the idea some time ago to the former Minister of Transport, Mac Maharaj, and it struck an enthusiastic response. FleetWatch will take the proposal the new Minister of Transport once finalised. Are we aiming too high? Are we being idealistic? Are we being practical? We think not. After all, if you adopt a policy of voluntary compliance, you don't have to wear sack cloth and ashes and beat yourself with a birch. Voluntary compliance and safe practice actually turns into huge profits but it does demand management attention, training and enormous physical effort. It also demands discipline but surely all this is not beyond the capabilities of the transport operators of this country. Throughout the world, the most productive businesses and most productive nations act in a spirit of safety - and safety is all embracing. What is the alternative. Not good when one considers that one horrendous loss can wipe out a business in terms of insurance and court claims. Let's rather stay on the roads and out of the courts. Full details of the FleetWatch Prestige Truck Club will be published in our next edition. In the meantime, act on the implementation of voluntary compliance within your company. Apart from keeping us off the front pages of the world's newspapers, it makes good business sense. Alternative Articles |
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Big Wake-Up Call