The Association of Lorry Loader Manufacturers & Importers (ALLMI) says that Skanska’s ban will prevent many more lorries making deliveries to its sites than it thinks.
ALLMI predicts that the result will be either massive disruption on sites or the ban simply being ignored out of expediency.
Last month Skanska announced that from 1st August it will no longer allow on its sites any lorries with loader cranes whose stabiliser legs swing-up and rotate across the fixed control panel for storage. [See our previous report here.]
The ban follows a fatal incident at a Skanska site at Shirehampton, Bristol in September 2021 that involved the operator being crushed against the side of the truck by a retracting stabiliser leg.
Skanska estimated that it would affect less than 5% of deliveries to its sites since its survey of 47 lorry loader-related unloading activities found only two that operated with the stabilisers moving across the fixed controls.
However, ALLMI says that this is an underestimate because Skanska has since confirmed that its ban includes cranes with remote controls, where the operator is able to stand well clear of the danger zone. This was not immediately clear from Skanska’s document on this matter, ALLMI said.
“It has been confirmed that the ban includes the use of lorry loaders with remotes where the leg rotates across fixed controls, and in this situation ‘fixed controls’ includes emergency levers or equipment on which the standard levers have been removed,” ALLMI chairman Alan Johnson said in an open letter to the industry.
He wrote: “Our main concern is that Skanska has included in its ban all cranes where the stabilisers are normally operated by radio remote control, but which have ancillary control levers for use only in the event of the need to recover / stow the stabilisers under an emergency scenario (e.g. loss of power to the remote control), and where the stabiliser rotates across the position of these controls. The inclusion of this type of equipment within the ban significantly increases the number affected, far above the ‘two out of 47’ figure mentioned in Skanska’s document. For example, one of our larger Operators’ Forum members has effectively gone from having no vehicles included in the ban, to almost all of their fleet. This includes new vehicles where the builds were interrupted to specifically remove the fixed lever operating stations in direct response to the original safety alerts issued in October 2021.
“Furthermore, we feel that, given the unlikely scenario of needing to use emergency levers (which would require failure of both the radio control and the back-up umbilical cord), and given the other control measures that could be put in place, to include this equipment in the ban constitutes a disproportionate response, and one which has the potential to cause irrevocable damage to the UK lorry loader industry. This, in turn, could lead to widespread disruption of the cabin / plant sector, or the ban being largely ignored out of sheer necessity on site.”
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