Inspectors to target tyre safety risks
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland is releasing new resources on tyre safety in the transport sector to encourage safer work practices and more effective risk controls.
The focus comes as a company was recently fined $200,000 over an incident in which a man died while attempting to inflate a tyre. The Workplace Health and Safety Queensland investigation identified a tear in the tyre wall, caused by a zipper failure – a tear of all the components in the side wall of a steel cord radial ply truck tyre which causes the instantaneous release of stored energy.
To add to existing published guidance, transport operators are being asked to send in examples of how tyre safety risks have been successfully managed at their workplaces. These will be published as short case studies for others in the industry to learn from. If this is of interest to you, please contact us at industrystrategy@oir.qld.gov.au.
Tyres pose significant safety risks to workers and others across their lifecycle, with injuries common during fitting, moving, storing and disposing of tyres. Free-standing stacks of old tyres are particularly dangerous if the stack is unstable and topples.
Risks from tyres include:
- no workplace systems for handling tyres from delivery to fitting
- during the actual tasks (split rims and hazardous manual task risks)
- usage (inflation levels, repairs and tyre pyrolsis)
- ad hoc tyre storage (freestanding risks: leaning against sheds and other structures)
- interactions between stored tyres and mobile plant
- disposal (loading and burning).
Further information
Read about safety with tyre fitting and tyre explosions, and two incidents involving tyres: