The Manager's decision to immobilise the vehicle while in motion was not just stupid - it shows a reckless disregard for the safety of his employees. All because they stopped to get something to eat...really?
One wonders what other aspects of the organisation's safety culture are amiss. Certainly there appears to be a very poor level of communication with their staff if he did that without 1st calling the driver to ask why she had deviated from the travel plan.

Darren's question is very pertinent. When the engine stops, the power assistance to both the steering and brakes also stops. The driver's ability to steer and stop would have been severely compromised.

A very interesting discussion.
We had a near fatal incident last year. 4 different PCBU's had failures that contributed to the event, each of which may have prevented the event if the failure had not occurred. The final failed defence, however, was a driver who did not follow the correct procedure in securing his load. To this day he is unable to explain why he failed to do so. There is no apparent reason for him to have not done so.

Our drivers work unsupervised and we have to be able to rely on them doing their job properly. We know that they are capable of violations. But apart from identifying the potential for that and setting Safe Operating Procedures to minimise the risk there is little we can do about it. Our pre-employment assessments weed out the majority of those we feel unable to trust. Random monitoring of driver performance and site safety observations identifies others for further coaching. But the bottom line is anything more than that is not 'Reasonably Practicable'. WorkSafe asked us to consider an engineering solution that would physically prevent each part of the load from coming off the truck until the crane was hitched up to it. Given the variety of shapes and sizes of the loads, this is not just impracticable - it is impossible!

Hi Peter,
I think your suggestion of topic specific forums is an excellent idea. 2 topics very relevant to the transport and logistics industry would be forklift safety and heavy vehicle safety. If you set those up I have several contributions I can make immediately to get the ball rolling.

I don't think anyone could disagree with all the above comments. I particularly want to expand on Michael's comments about ConstructSafe and SiteSafe. ConstructSafe is a very good independent measure of the applicant's actual knowledge, while SiteSafe simply requires attendance at the training session. Unfortunately ConstructSafe is based on an English system and uses international symbols that are not used in NZ (maybe they should be! - that is a different conversation) and in my experience, many of our staff struggle with them. Also the photos are difficult to interpret without a magnifier.
To me the biggest indicator of the state of our H&S culture is the shear hypocrisy of the concept that without a SiteSafe card you are not safe enough to be let onto site, but if you pay for a course that you haven't yet done, you are now deemed to be safe enough, so come on in!
The reality is that neither qualification actually does anything to improve safety in the workplace.