Unsecured loads falling off trucks. Wheels coming off a school bus and a patient transportation vehicle. Drivers running 36 hours straight. Brakes shot. Signals out.
Police from southern Ontario were not lost for words at a truck show just outside Toronto in April. Truck World takes place every two years at the International Centre in Brampton. This year’s roster featured two sessions on truck safety.
The officers who spoke had tales aplenty about miscreant trucks they’ve hauled off the road — often after fatal mishaps, sometimes thankfully before anything serious happened.
Staff Sgt. Mike Hinsperger of Waterloo Regional Police Service spoke of two sisters, ages 19 and 23, who died in 2007 after being struck by a truck with three-quarters of its brakes inoperative. The company was fined $10,000 for failing to maintain the vehicle to proper standards.
Overweight truck proves fatal
Const. Pat Martin of Halton Regional Police Service told of a woman traveling on Highway 25 in the Town of Oakville to visit her boyfriend. The southbound dump truck that killed her was four and a half metric tonnes over its allowable weight, and most brakes were inoperative.
“That was my first fatality as a CVSA officer,” Martin said, referring to the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a North America-wide organization that certifies inspectors.
Soon afterwards, in the same town, an overloaded dump truck with misaligned brakes struck a car, seriously injuring an elderly couple who had just dropped their granddaughter at preschool.
Martin was particularly moved by the story of a woman who happened to be a municipal transit safety officer in Barrie, north of Toronto. Driving northbound on Highway 400, she died when a southbound truck, faced with a sudden traffic jam, couldn’t stop and collided with a rental van, pushing the van over the median into the northbound lanes and into the woman’s path.
“When the driver left he didn’t do his daily pre-trip inspection,” Martin said. “Investigators (from the Ontario Provincial Police) found seven brakes out of adjustment on his trailer. He went to court and was convicted of criminal negligence causing death — not a Highway Traffic Act offence — and got four years custody and a 15-year driver’s license suspension. If he’d done his daily inspection we would have had a different ending.”
Hinsperger and Martin are both members of the Ontario Police Commercial Vehicle Committee — chair and vice-chair respectively — and their goal at Truck World was to persuade drivers to take their safety obligations seriously.
“Extremely preventable”
Staff Sgt. Mike Hinsperger of Waterloo Regional Police Service says a proper pre-trip inspection will find “the vast majority of defects” on a truck.Photo: Saul Chernos
Hinsperger drove long-haul and local-haul transport for a dozen years in an earlier career, so he understands the world of trucking even as the pair, with their respective detachments, perform inspections on a daily basis, often collaborating with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, the provincial governing body.
“The stuff we’re finding is extremely preventable,” Hinsperger said. “Drivers could find the vast majority of defects that we see simply by completing a proper trip inspection prior to going on the highway.”
During inspection blitzes police and transport ministry enforcement personnel conducted in Ontario last year, officers stopped 1,837 trucks and placed 748 of them out of service for major defects.
“That’s a 40 percent out-of-service rate, with 1,574 charges laid,” Hinsperger said. “A lot of the stuff we find when we do Level 1 inspections (complete vehicle inspections) is stuff the driver should have found prior to us. So preventability is the issue we want you to take away today.”
In Ontario, Regulation 199(07) of the Highway Traffic Act mandates pre-trip inspections on a 24-hour timeline. However, while defects must be noted and often addressed during pre-trip inspections, trucks must also be monitored while in use.
“If some lights go out, it’s considered a minor defect and you can still operate the truck but you must note the defect at the time it’s found,” Hinsperger said. “Then you have to report it to the shop and it has to be repaired before you go out with the truck again. And if a truck changes trailers, the inspection report must reflect that new trailer — it’s like a new vehicle.”
Under Ontario law, drivers must let the vehicle owner or operator know of any defects they find, and reports listing defects must be kept for three months.
Mechanics share responsibility
Some attendees lamented that drivers seem to bear the onus, but Hinsperger pointed out that drivers aren’t alone in bearing responsibility or facing charges. “It could be the owner of the company, it could be a mechanic, it could be the driver,” he said.
While a driver does bear responsibility, the operator of the company is ultimately responsible for the conduct of its drivers and the operation of its vehicles. “The driver is going to get charged if there are issues, but there are certain circumstances where the driver may not be charged,” Hinsperger said.
Martin, his co-presenter, chimed in: “Sometimes we find there’s a blame game. The driver will blame the company or the company will blame the driver. Our courts (in Halton Region) want us to charge both parties so they can come to court as one single entity and the prosecutor can determine, in court as opposed to at the roadside, whose responsibility that defect is.”
Sgt. Scott Parker, who oversees commercial vehicle and dangerous goods enforcement for the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), spoke about wheel separations.
Breaking down the 94 wheel separations reported to him personally in 2017 by police officers across Ontario, Parker attributed 68 instances to failed fasteners, 23 to failed bearings, and three to broken wheels. He also noted a spike in events during lower temperatures, leading to the same culprit Hinsperger and Martin fingered — failure to perform pre-trip vehicle inspections adequately or at all.
“It’s cold,” Parker said. “The pre-trip is being done inside the cab. Things are not being checked.”
Long hours responsible
Interestingly, the problem in Ontario is largely domestic. “The vehicles that are losing their wheels in this province by and far are Ontario-plated vehicles,” Parker said, showing a short video clip of a spun-off tire killing a motorcyclist. “It’s a problem we own.”
It’s not just trucks. Parker told of one patient transportation vehicle losing a wheel while moving someone between hospitals. Const. Dal Gill of Toronto Police Service, Parker’s co-presenter, recalled motorists alerting officers to a school bus carrying children with a wheel breaking off on Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway.
Vehicle mishaps don’t always involve failing equipment. Halton’s Pat Martin recalled a collision involving a transport trailer that crossed the median and struck an oncoming car, killing its lone occupant.
“The driver of that transport truck was up 36 hours straight,” Martin said. “His logbooks didn’t show that, but when we went back and did the investigation we determined he’d been all the way down to Ohio and had come all the way back up. It took a couple of years to convict him of criminal negligence, and he received seven years in custody.”
The candle might not burn at both ends much longer for Canadian motorists. At another session on electronic logging devices (ELDs), Rihard Suler of Isaac Instruments reminded attendees that ELD devices will be mandatory north of the border sometime in 2020. (ELD’s became mandatory in the U.S. in December 2017, with a grace period that expired March 31, 2018.)
Electronic logs will replace paper ones and will record actual driving hours. The new systems will be attached to a truck’s wheels and won’t be able to fake driving times, Suler said.
While paper logs are currently legal in Canada, fleet managers can install an automatic on-board recording device to eliminate cheating. They will then be able to use AOBRD until 2022, whereas those without AOBRD devices prior to the 2020 date will generally need to go straight to ELD.
— Saul Chernos
Saul Chernos is a freelance writer based in Toronto.