Tree work incident report 22WA5252: a woodchip truck rolls away at a sawmill tarping station, Washington

This page reports what the official source says. It is not legal advice: ask the office named here. This page restates one official fatality report in our own words: case 52-52-2022 (22WA5252) from the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries FACE program, dated April 12, 2022. It covers a driver hauling wood chips from a sawmill, so it sits at the edge of tree work, in the chip haul that follows it. No one is named here or in the report. OSHA lists the report under struck-by on its tree care page. The table of every report we read is in the official case library for tree work incidents.

The job and the employer

The employer was a long-haul trucking company moving wood chips, sawdust and shavings from sawmills to pulp mills, with 31 semi trucks and 49 drivers, across the Canada and United States border. The driver had been hired three months earlier after finishing a commercial licence course, and had completed a four-week mentoring program. He was making two daily five-hour round trips between a sawmill in eastern Washington and a pulp mill in British Columbia, and had loaded at that mill at least 30 times. The employer had a written 80 page accident prevention program that required a driver to set the parking brake each time the cab was left. The report says the employer declined to be interviewed, so the investigators worked from the state inspection file.

What happened

He arrived at 11:18 p.m. on July 29, 2019, and loaded under steel bins. He then parked under the fall protection tarping station, a scaffold with guardrails, on a paved road with a 2 percent downgrade. The rules there were to set the parking brake, switch off the engine and pocket the key. The report says he left the engine running, the transmission in neutral and the brake off. The truck began to roll while he was walking on top of the load. He ran toward the ladder at the front of the trailer, went over the edge and fell to the road. The truck rolled on down the grade until it stopped with the rear of the trailer almost level with the station exit. The only other driver on site saw the truck move but took it for a driver pulling forward, parked beside it for seven minutes and left. A third driver from the same company found him nearly two hours later under the left front drive wheels. The cause of death was crush injury.

The report notes that semi tractors of this type have no park position in the transmission, so the brake is the only hold. The post-incident inspection found no brake fault. A manager, safety supervisor and trainer all knew of the downgrade but had no means of checking that drivers set their brakes. A driver told the inspector he believed most drivers disarmed the in-cab alarm that sounds when a driver leaves the seat with the brake off. Only four audits were made at the mill in the six months around the date, because not all safety supervisors had work visas to cross the border.

Contributing factors the report lists

Four: the uneven grade at the tarping area, parking brake rules in the program not followed, an inadequate brake and wheel chock policy in the program, and too few safety audits of drivers and customer sites abroad.

What the report recommends

Four recommendations. Employers install electronic parking brakes that set themselves when the driver leaves the seat. Employers write a brake and chocking policy with strict rollaway rules, which the report says should require the brake at every stop, wheels turned and chocked on any grade, and tells drivers not to jump on or off a rolling truck. Employers work with owners of remote customer sites on hazard checks and fixes such as repaving and signs. Employers help safety supervisors obtain work visas or hire consultants abroad for audits. For other work near moving vehicles see the guide to traffic and roadside tree work, and for the chip machines themselves the guide to chippers and stump grinders.

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