Hi everyone, need to call upon your collective wisdom again....

We have got two of our own flat-bed lorries, with side boards and a tail lift, which we use to deliver various parts to site.

The site we've just started working on aren't letting our guys get up onto the back of the lorry to unstrap and offload, even with the sideboards up and using the tail lift to go up and down. The other day we were forced to position a cherry picker over the back of the lorry and attach a fall arrest lanyard to it, with our guy harnessed to the other end . . . even though the fall arrest distance was greater than the height from the floor, so this only added the effect of adding a trip hazard.

We do try palletise whatever we can so it can be offloaded with a fork truck but not everything can be.

I appreciate this task is one quite high risk due to moderatly high likelihood and moderatly high severity, but I cant think of anything else we can do which is actually practical. Any thoughts?

p.s. the places we deliver to dont normally have proper off-loading gantries.

thanks in advance, Steve.

Hi Steve,
We deliver to a lot of water utility sites with our vehicles as well. All of them are HIAB flatbeds. We have the tail boards and side boards in place and a removable chain rail with supports fixed into the bed which sits at waist height that goes around the vehicle bed. This slightly increases the safety of the driver on the bed. Maybe you could consider this? We have to allow our drivers onto the back to unstrap the loads.As it is not always a case of being able to have them lifted off by forks or HIAB/crane as there are other smaller loads on the middle of the bed.

There is no other reasonable way. We do however cut down the time the drivers are on the back by having the loads pre lift ready with lifting straps already in place so when they arrive on site it is minimised. You could if it is a regular occurence put in place a Method statement or risk assessment after assessing your drivers and the need to be on the back of the bed.
You could place some of the onus onto your clients and ask that they provide suitable fall arrest systems and a suitable lift plan i.e. inflatables or a proper offload facility like a bay or the use of a suitable crane for the lifts. I am sure under BS7171 they should have provided that to you before that lift with the cherry picker was carried out.

As long as you have shown and done what you deam to be reasonably practical for your drivers then there should not be a problem.

hope this helps.