By Eugene Bingham, 60 Minutes producer
That vulnerable feeling car drivers get in the shadow of a monster truck won’t have been helped by our 60 Minutes story, Braking Point. Sorry about that.
It told the story of a 2007 crash in which Waikanae mother Laurel FitzGeorge was killed when a 44-tonne truck rolled coming down the Rimutaka Hill road towards Masterton.
It turned out the truck and trailers had serious brake problems which meant it should not have been on the road.
Following the accident, the NZ Transport Agency investigated the company, Tyson Holdings, owned by Wayne Weber, of Palmerston North.
The investigation found that the company did not have a proper maintenance programme, and that all of the nine vehicles they inspected had multiple faults. Six had brake faults.
Alarming stuff for a fleet that was driving up and down the North Island.
Laurel FitzGeorge was the unlucky person who paid the price.
The faults, the lack of a maintenance programme, and a variety of other problems led the Transport Agency to revoke Tyson Holdings’ operator licence.
If you saw the story, you’ll know that Weber is adamant that his trucks were safe and that the agency was “nit-picking”.
It turns out the agency had been in touch with his company in September 2006 when it became concerned about the high failure rate at first inspection for Certificate of Fitness checks. More than 80% of the time its trucks turned up for COF, they failed first time around.
The agency believed that this was evidence the company was using a COF check to identify faults – when you consider that the trucks were sometimes driving thousands of kilometres a week, you’d have thought there would be some sort of checks done more than once every six months.
But despite the approach from the agency – a “we’re here to help” letter – the company did not respond.
“We wrote a letter, we rang [the owner] up and we spoke to the office manager…and we said, ‘Look, we want to work with you on this. There are some issues that need to be addressed’,” John Doesburg, the agency’s commercial road manager told 60 Minutes. “[The owner] didn’t respond to that at all.”
And when there was no reply? Well, nothing more happened before Laurel FitzGeorge died. Shouldn’t the agency have followed up? Reporter Amanda Millar asked Doesburg what responsibility the agency felt.
“We would have to accept some responsibility… but I want to put that in context,” said Doesburg.
“The staff that were involved worked with other operators at that time that had similar profiles and wanted to work with us and have reduced their non-compliance.
“We were going to work at some stage with Mr Weber and Tyson Holdings. There was no doubt about that, timeframe unknown, and unfortunately we’ve now had a crash that has resulted in a death. Yes, we have to look at our processes.”
So the agency was too busy dealing with other truck firms with problems. Yikes.
Doesburg couldn’t tell us how many had problems as serious as Tysons, though he did say the agency had revoked other operators’ licences.
He believes a new Operator Rating System which tracks the safety of commercial vehicles will help improve the agency’s ability to get onto problems swiftly.
If you ask truckies, they put problems on our roads down to shocking driving by other motorists. And the facts show that truck drivers are only responsible for about a third of the fatal accidents they’re involved in.
Transport giant Mainfreight was at pains to point out to us that drivers have to put up with a lot on the road, and they even gave us some footage to illustrate their point.
The images come from truck cabs fitted with cameras that start recording any time a truck has to swerve or brake suddenly. We used some of the clips in the story, but we’ve included some more here for you to look at.
They’re pretty frightening viewing and certainly remind you that it’s not an easy job behind the wheel of a big rig.
Just remember that the next time a 44-tonne monster looms into view.