Feature: Caltex and Volvo partner for safety

As Bruce Honeywill recently discovered, Volvo Group Australia and Caltex have been busy forging ties to enhance road transport safety

The aftermath of the fiery horror of the Mona Vale tragedy has reverberated throughout the nation. The terrible images of the burning fuel tanker and the following debacle with Cootes Transport has, once again, prompted the road transport industry to reflect and review its practices and procedures.

A partnership between a truck manufacturer and a major fuel distributor has yielded a suite of training and safety protocols to make the roads a safer place and, in the wake of the industry copping a bashing from the mainstream media, both were keen to tell their story.

The partnership between Caltex and Volvo Group Australia, now in its fourth year, was demonstrated to journalists at a field day close to the Caltex refinery at Lytton, near the mouth of the Brisbane River. It quickly became clear that safety for drivers and other road users has become a priority of paramount importance for road transport firms, key to both their corporate philosophy and their public perception.

While Caltex strives for a high level of competency and professionalism amongst its drivers and safety has always been a cornerstone for Volvo, the demo was much more than a talkfest. Journalists were also given a spectacular demonstration of just what can be done in an fuel tanker emergency.

FIERY RECEPTION

At a Queensland Fire and Rescue Service (QFRS) training facility, firemen dressed in heavy thermal protection gear set fire to a facsimile of a fuel tanker. The flames shot into the sky and the heat was intense as QFRS trainer Sven Diga (pictured) explained how typically a water appliance was first on the scene of a tanker fire.

“Water won’t extinguish a combustible liquid fire but is used to contain the fire,” he shouted over the roar of fire and the gush of high-pressure water.

Firemen directed their hoses at the rivulets of fire created by the spilling fuel, the water forcing the blaze back under the tank.

“The idea is to contain the spread of the fire until the foam appliance arrives,” Sven shouted.

“The fire will be extinguished by foam.”

The blaze was unsettling; it was easy to imagine it exploding a hundred times in size to match the images we’ve seen all too often on our television screens of late.

Caltex transport specialist Greg Royston said the partnership with Volvo, combined with special driver selection and training, drove the safety program for the Caltex on-highway fuel distribution network. While drivers were monitored via on-board driver cameras and a wide range of substance testing, Royston said driver motivation was the best tool in keeping highways safe.

“Our Driver of the Year Award brings the drivers together to show their skills and it builds camaraderie,” he said.

Royston flew up from his base in Sydney and Caltex drivers were pulled in from across the country, including former Caltex Driver of the Year, Greg Quick, from Adelaide. The company was taking the day seriously.

TOP TRAINING

A common scenario was set up: a car had run into a prime mover, causing a fuel spill. Greg Quick and fellow driver Brian Smith went through the process of stabilising a situation where 30,000 litres of combustibles were at stake.

The first priority is human safety and the drivers pulled the car driver, in this case a dummy, to a safe distance. Then the leak was stemmed, with a particular focus on sandbagging any drain inlets near the incident. Traffic was controlled, the other vehicles kept at a safe distance during the wait for emergency services.

The professionalism of the Caltex drivers was obvious and the take-home message was clear: on-highway safety is not an isolated responsibility and solid results can be achieved through cross-industry partnerships, such as that between Caltex and Volvo.

Safety has always been a marketing point for Volvo. It was the spear thrust of the Swedish truck division’s marketing campaign in the ’80s. Safety was the company’s sacred cow back then, an unassailable facet of the Volvo heavy truck and car sectors. On the car side ‘Volvo drivers’ became a satirised group, typified by well-to-do grandma and grandpa, be-hatted and toodling off to the bowls club in the safety cocoon of their luxurious Volvo.

Volvo’s Australian truck division copped a few bruises in the second half of the ’80s when it learned the hard way that trucks with safety engineered into them and designed for Europe’s super-smooth autobahns behaved very differently at the legal limit on Australian roads.

However, after a rigid, conservative refusal to accept any lack of safety, the drawbridge of Gothenburg came down and management and engineers accepted that mad Australian drivers were throwing the trucks into corners with wrong-way cambers and shuddering corrugations. The engineers dug deep and pinpointed the harmonics that hampered control at speed and when under stress. Volvo trucks, globally, became better for the lessons learned on long Australian runs.

But that’s all last-century stuff. The 21st century brought the ‘world truck’: wind tunnels and emission standards hammered all makes of highway trucks into siblings suckling on the teats of regulation and fuel efficiency. Both cab-overs and conventionals began taking similar forms. Marketing points became fuel efficiency, eco-greeniness and after-sales service packages.

Today varying levels of built-in safety technology and equipment are an important part of market differentiation, with the European truck builders undoubtedly leading the field. Now physical differences between trucks largely manifest through minor design approaches to panel design, grill, mirrors, trim and lighting.

SAFETY PRIORITY

In a recent Volvo Group Australia media conference, the newly appointed Vice President of Volvo Trucks in Australia, Mitch Peden, listed Volvo’s priorities as productivity, security, driver appeal, fuel efficiency and safety. While safety was the last item in his presentation he also devoted half of that presentation to the subject.

The safety philosophy of Volvo was set when the founders of the company said, in 1927, Swedish words to the effect of: “If our vehicles are to carry people then their safety must be a prime concern.”

And you have to give Volvo full points for meeting the aspirations of its company founders almost 90 years ago. Visiting Gothenburg for the FH launch in the northern autumn of 2012, the investment in safety research and engineering was the most impressive this writer has ever seen.

Today the reinforced capsule that is the cab, the design of components such as the steering wheel and the removal of protrusions that cripple a seat-belted driver, combine with all the high-tech devices such as lane-change monitoring, intelligent cruise control, stability and braking technology to make the truck as safe as possible.

Many more safety innovations will be introduced to Australia in the third and fourth quarter 2014. These options will give an operator a choice when it comes to selecting a truck with safety as a priority.

But what was revealed at Lytton, as those brave men of the QFRS waded in with their hoses, was that the future of road transport safety lies in cross-industry teamwork. That was amply demonstrated by Caltex’s skilled drivers and mindful management, and enhanced by the built-in and improving safety technology found in Volvo’s trucks.

Feature: Caltex and Volvo partner for safety

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