Ask a safety manager where their drivers get hurt most often and the answer is not the motorway - it is the three feet between the ground and the load bed. Climbing up to sheet or unsheet, stepping down from the catwalk with an arm full of straps, jumping the last rung of the ladder on wet steel: falls from vehicles are one of the most common serious injury mechanisms in road transport, and they happen at walking pace, in the yard, to experienced people.
HSE’s guidance on avoiding falls from workplace vehicles names the causes directly: climbing on loads, slippery surfaces, uneven ladders or walkways, and using inappropriate parts of the vehicle as support. Employers have legal duties to try to prevent falls. The guidance that follows is practical enough to audit a fleet against this week.
The strongest control is eliminating the climb. HSE’s starting questions are about design:
A load that must be checked from the top of a trailer every load, every day, at a customer’s bay is a candidate for a platform or a ground-level check process, not for a career of climbing.
HSE’s specifications for unavoidable access are detailed. Access should be via a well-constructed ladder, placed at the front or back of the vehicle as close as possible to the relevant part, of sound construction, properly maintained and securely fixed. Ladders should be vertical or slope inwards toward the top if possible, with horizontal rungs giving plenty of toe or foothold.
Where people work on top of vehicles, walkways should be used wherever possible: non-slip grating or another non-slip material, with top and middle guardrails where people work standing or crouching, and collapsible handrails as an option to consider. The picture to hold in mind is the difference between a designed access system and a driver balancing on a wheel hub holding the mirror arm - the guidance exists to make the second version indefensible.
Two absolute rules sit alongside: no one should ever attempt to join a moving vehicle - a significant cause of accidents each year - and passengers should only be carried if the vehicle is designed to accommodate them safely, with suitable seating.
Falls happen at customer premises as much as at home base, and HSE is explicit that different employers working in the same place may have a legal obligation to co-ordinate their safety measures. For transport operators this cuts into daily routine: the driver sheeting a load at a builder’s merchant or unloading at a retailer is working inside someone else’s site duties as well as yours.
The guidance’s examples of practical co-ordination: operators may need to fit additional safety features or find alternative means of access - with the caution that retrofits must not compromise structural integrity and the retrofitting itself must be safe (welding onto petrol tankers is the vivid counter-example). And where safe access to the top of the vehicle cannot be achieved permanently, an alternative should be provided at the destination - a suitable set of step ladders supplied by the site operator or retailer is HSE’s own illustration. The point for fleet managers: “what does the driver stand on at the delivery point” is a legitimate question to settle with the customer in advance, not the driver’s problem to improvise.
Falls are unglamorous injuries: no jack-knife, no headlines, just a ladder, a wet boot and a long absence. The controls are equally unglamorous - ground-level access, sound ladders, non-slip walkways, guardrails, discipline - and they are the difference between a yard that hurts people and one that does not.