Terrible things will happen in our lives - great people will make something good come from them.
During my time in MEM, in 1991, a water truck operator was killed at Channar. He was backing his water truck (a converted Terex haultruck) across a bench to fill the water tank on a blast hole drill. It was nightshift, and he didn’t have a spotter. He backed over the edge of the 15 metre bench, and the truck flipped over as it fell to the next bench, crushing the cab.
I came to work the next day, unaware that this had happened. At about 0715, my friend, and the acting Maintenance Manager, Dave Lamb walked into my office and collapsed into a chair. I mean “collapsed” – he looked terrible. “What’s up, Lambie?”
“There was an accident at Channar last night – we just finished cutting the operators body out of the cab.” They had called Dave when it happened, and he had arrived on site soon after and ended up helping to recover the body. He was shattered – that sort of thing has a deep effect on anyone.
How Dave carried himself, and supported the others involved, through that immediate crisis, was truly inspirational. You don’t often see heroism in the workplace - Dave’s conduct was worthy of the title.
What happened afterwards, though, was perhaps a larger lesson for me.
Earthmoving equipment typically has two levels of cab/operator protection, since about the late 70’s – FOPS (Falling Object Protective Structure – to protect the cab if a big rock fell on it) and ROPS (Roll Over Protective Structure – to protect the cab if the vehicle rolls over). These structures are designed according to strict standards, and are tested to destruction and individually certified. As such, you can be pretty sure if your cab has a ROPS and the vehicle is involved in a rollover, the cab won’t be crushed or smashed and the operator has a good chance of surviving.
The exception was haultrucks. The Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM’s) had made the case that it couldn’t be done - they were too big, the structure was in the wrong place, it was redundant because of the tray headboard…any number of reasons. This was accepted by the industry worldwide, so no ROPS/FOPS for haultrucks, and our man had died in a truck rollover.
Dave went to Tom Price a year or so later, as the Mining Equipment Maintenance Manager. A year into that job, they began the process of replacing the entire Tom Price haultruck fleet. A 30 truck fleet is small change now, but then it was a very big ticket.
When they wrote the scope (which I assisted with), it included a requirement for “ROPS/FOPS”. All the OEM’s came back immediately and said, “Surely some mistake…”
Dave said, “No – I’m not buying any truck that doesn’t have ROPS/FOPS. I’m not having any more dead operators”.
They (of course) made a lot of noise, including trying to influence the CEO and Chairman of the business to, effectively, “pull Dave into line”. And he had to make his case to the business that he was right. But they backed him.
2 years later, the fleet was commissioned, with ROPS/FOPS – which immediately became standard across the industry, worldwide. And a large amount of operator lives have been saved as a result. It was also the issue that kicked off a generation of successful customer activism about a range of operator safety issues the OEM’s wouldn’t address – operator access, cab design, seat quality, maintenance hazards…suddenly it was known that if you took a stand and made some noise (and you had a big order pending), the OEM’s would make changes.
That is a legacy worth leaving – outstanding work, David Lamb!