RLM Distributing Mr Greg Hanlon The recent death of a man inflating a Wheelbarrow tyre at a local service station shows how dangerous pumping up a tyre can be. Workers that repair or handle tyres for large vehicles face this risk everyday. “Tractor and truck tyres can explode with lethal force” states Mr Greg Hanlon of RLM Distributing. “And nearly every time a tyre explosion death is investigated, the Coroner rules that the death could have been prevented.” In many cases the victims are young inexperienced workers. A young South Australian man was killed fitting a tyre to a semi trailer. Unsupervised and poorly trained he had fitted the wrong tyre to an old rim. When the tyre exploded parts of the rim hit him in the chest killing him instantly. Myths also play a part in many of the accidents. A young Western Australian man received multiple injuries when he placed a tyre he had repaired under the rear hydraulic ramp of a truck. He had been told that the ramp would stop him being injured should the tyre explode while he was reinflating it. Unfortunately the tyre did explode. The young worker, who was sitting on the ramp when the explosion occurred, was catapulted through air the by the bucking ramp. “We developed a Tyre Safety cage in 1996” says Mr Hanlon. “These sort of injures should not be happening”. The cage is designed to arrest the force of an exploding tyre. Workers can secure the air hose to the valve and move away from the cage. If an explosion takes place the worker should be out of harms way. Mr Hanlon advises that, “Other things to look out for include damaged or rusted rims”. Another young worker was killed when an old tractor rim collapsed after being fitted with a new tyre. “As a father with sons entering the workforce I expect that they will be in a safe environment when they are at work”, says Mr Hanlon. Unfortunately tyre fitting can be one of those jobs given to juniors so they can ‘learn the ropes’. But the fact is it is an activity that needs to be correctly supervised. In the case of the worker killed by the tractor tyre the supervisor had gone to answer the phone when the accident occurred. A cage would have saved this young man’s life. Careful supervision would have prevented him from stepping into harms way in the first place. |