National Transport Insurance (NTI) received Federal Government funding through the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator’s (NHVR) Heavy Vehicle Safety Initiative back in 2022 to develop and deliver ‘Spilt Milk: A national crash reduction program for the dairy industry.
The initiative came about after NTI’s National Accident Research Centre (NTARC) found that dairy tankers were 2.4 times more likely to be involved in a major crash than other freight-carrying heavy vehicles, and of those accidents around 80 per cent involved a single-vehicle.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, NTI worked with drivers, fleet managers and consignors across the dairy supply chain to design and deliver a vital safety program for the $4.4 billion dairy industry.
The result was a package of resources for dairy transporters that includes research reports outlining the key factors behind the high rate of rollovers, a ‘Tanker Basic’ book explaining tanker components and a series of videos and training resources. One video even shows never-before-seen footage from inside a milk tanker, displaying the side-to-side slosh that can contribute to rollovers.
Speaking at at the Australian Trucking Association’s (ATA) Trucking Australia conference in Canberra recently, NTI Transport and Logistics Risk Engineer, Adam Gibson, who also authors the NTARC Major Accident Report, outlined the success of the campaign.
“Our dairy tankers were crashing 2.4 times more often, and with basically double the average incident costs, so five times higher cost per insured unit than the average of all of our other occupations,” Mr Gibson said.
“We’ve got a pretty strong principle at NTI that if you see something, you have to do something.”
The project, once funded, started with significant time spent in dairy tankers and with fleet managers to establish what the industry required to improve safety outcomes.
“We sat with the ops managers, the workshop managers, with the bosses up in the office, and we asked them, ‘what’s working, what’s good, what’s bad, what do you need’,” Mr Gibson said.
“Then we built whatever they told us, because again, we were drawing on their expertise because, again, no one knows more about the dairy transport industry than the dairy transport industry.
“So our process was to draw out their existing expertise, make it shine, and hand it back to them, and I’ve got to say, it worked amazingly well.”
One of the key takeaways after spending countless hours in the cab of dairy tanker trucks, Mr Gibson says, was the fact very few operators understood the principles of ‘slosh and surge’.
“Of 14 drivers I spent time with, two knew their truck was baffled and one actually knew where the baffles were,” he said.
“So there were really limited resources and training around slosh and surge.”
After crunching the data and piecing the safety puzzle together, Mr Gibson says the resulting package is one that will best support the dairy industry as it strives to improve the safety outcomes of its drivers.
“Now there’s training packages, there’s posters, there’s videos, there’s guides, there is a pile of resources there,” he said.
“The goal there was to make resources that were good enough that our drivers would choose to watch them, rather than having to be locked in a room with a manager and forced to watch them.
“Each targets a different element to the problem and a different stakeholder group, but are intended to support each other.”
