Transit Parks ‘ll  reduce container mounted truck  accidents – CILT

By Ezurike Ugochukwu

The incessant cases of container falling off a moving truck, that many a times lead to loss of lives and property has given rise to the call by the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Nigeria, for the deployment of  Truck Transit Parks (TTP) being championed by the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC).

The call was made by the National Executive Director, CILT Nigeria, Mr.Paul Ndibe in Lagos stated that the institute had advocated that the nearest truck transit park to any of the ports should be designated as an extended port area.

Ndibe

When this is done, all the trucks leaving that transit park will go with a certificate showing  that they had been inspected and found fit to take any cargo from the port.

He noted that the truck transit park equipped with such facilities that would check the compression strength of the truck engine, stating,  “it is the compression that determines the load it will carry, to some points”, adding that “if the compression of the engine is weak, it means it may not be able to allow combustion to take place at designed capacity and that could impact on its capacity to haul or to pull.”

Ndibe further stated; “So, if a vehicle is expected to haul or pull a cargo of 35 tons, the ability to do that comes from the engine and that can be determined from the strength or the output from the level of combustion of the engine. So, if at that point, there is an equipment that can determine the compression level of the engine at the truck transit park, if a 20 tons truck enters the trucks park and heading to the port, it should pass through that equipment and that equipment will determine whether the compression level of the engine will be able to haul that designed load.

“If not, at that truck transit park, the load it can carry will be reduced on it so that you do not subject that truck to carry 20 tons load that it won’t be able to maneuver through the length of its journey.

“the point I am making here is that the truck transit park will have such equipment where this can be determined and at that truck transit park, there will be an inspection to determine whether the hooks holding the container are in place, whether they are strong enough. You see some trucks being tied, you find some, they use rope to tie the goods as opposed to latching. So, these are the difficulties that one may experience.

“But the bottom line is what do we do under the circumstance? So, there should be monitoring, there should be, outside the VIO, the driver being given a license and all that. There should be an institute that will help in this regard, the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport is there, it can help in monitoring of these drivers, sensitization and ensuring that there is compliance to certain level, that even the truck owner ensures that these things are there because you just licensed a driver, renews his license, renews the papers of the truck but at times, there are no physical inspection.

“Part of what the institute might do is to ensure that the vehicles renewal process includes also large degree of inspection. If a truck presents a document that the papers were renewed in the month of May and of course, there should be a system to check whether all the things that are expected to be there are there or not. So, also at that truck transit park, they can also check the tensile strength of the trucks carrying the loads. If all these are in place, sincerely speaking, it will help to reduce the rate of accident by more than 50 percent, let us now attribute the other 50 percent to the road situation which will not be addressed just all of a sudden. But these ones can be addressed.”

While stating that it was rather sad that this avoidable accident was happening and had continued to happen, he observed that there were few things one may have to look at namely; the road, the road worthiness of the truck, the container or the manner of packaging of the items inside it and off course the driver.

“But if you look at our situation, our road environment is one of the major contributors to this level of incident because if the road is uneven, undulating, the tyres of the truck will follow the contour and in doing that, it might tilt on one side or the other, of course, depending on the healthiness of the truck. If the springs around the axles have weakened and they are tilting on one side, and the contour falls on that side, the weight is more likely to fall to that side. So, what you see is that the container will capsize.

“But of course, the driver, what is the state of his mind at the time of the accident? What time of the day and then weather, the environment around that time that this thing happened, particularly the state of the driver? If the road is unsafe for you to pass, for goodness sake, you don’t need to try to see if it can pass. The burden might be to go round and take another route. So, the entire burden is on the state of the road”, he maintained.