Safe immobilising heavy vehicles and trailers campaign

Unsafe heavy vehicle and trailer immobilisation has led to several deaths and serious injuries in recent years when heavy vehicles have rolled away or moved without warning.

To tackle this issue, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland started a compliance and advisory campaign in 2016. This campaign sought to identify the causes of unsafe immobilisation, and provide businesses with resources to manage risks and ensure compliance with work health and safety laws.

Our inspectors have now carried out more than 400 assessments and issued improvement notices for:

• workers not safely immobilising trucks
• workers not coupling and decoupling trailers safely
• inadequate maintenance and risks while working under trucks and trailers
• absent or inadequate systems of work
• inadequate worker training, information, supervision or instruction.

Inspectors have noted that safety improvements were being made when businesses built safety obligations around the safe immobilisation of vehicles into their contractual arrangements for vehicles entering their worksite.

As an example of good practice, to manage the potential high risk from trucks not having their braking systems engaged, Woolworths has new requirements for all heavy vehicles on site to have engineering controls fitted, such as braking system alarms or automatic braking systems.

Our inspectors continue to visit workplaces to look into this issue. To help ensure your workplace is safe and compliant, we have published a campaign report and self-assessment tool to worksafe.qld.gov.au.