Adrian Wood died while lifting steel bars off his lorry’s flatbed with the vehicle’s loader crane and placing them on a trailer parked alongside. He was standing between the two vehicles. Every load he transferred reduced the weight bearing down on his vehicle’s chassis until, finally, the turning moment exerted by the crane was enough to tip the lorry over. The operator was crushed against the second vehicle.

The knuckle-boom crane involved in this accident was relatively new; and neither it nor the vehicle to which it was fitted was faulty. But although the machine was equipped with stabiliser legs, these were not deployed. As always in the aftermath of tragic accidents like this, UK Health & Safety Executive (HSE) launched an investigation which focused, inevitably, on the question of the stability of vehicles fitted with loader cranes.

In discussions with the UK’s Association of Lorry Loader Manufacturers & Importers (ALLMI) the HSE made it clear that it felt the Essential Health and Safety Requirements of the Supply of Machinery (Safety) Regulations (specifically, EHSR 1.3.1 relating to stability) were not satisfied for truck loaders – or lorry loaders as they are called in the UK. Because these machines could be used without the necessary stabilisers extended, there was an ever-present risk that other operators would make the same fatal mistake as Adrian Wood.

The HSE’s investigations soon established that interlock devices, designed to prevent the use of a lorry loader crane without its stabilisers deployed, were available from most major manufacturers. Furthermore, it was found that such devices had already been fitted to a small number of lorry loader cranes at the request of UK customers. That settled it: HSE declared an intention to issue improvement notices to UK suppliers of lorry loader cranes requiring them to incorporate stabiliser interlocks as mandatory standard equipment as required under the Supply of Machinery regulations. ALLMI, however, believed the HSE argument to be flawed, and sent a 15-point response to the HSE to explain why.

What happened next shocked not only ALLMI, but also every supplier and importer of lorry loaders in the UK. The HSE issued a statement – not directly to the interested parties, but to the technical press – warning that interlock devices must be fitted to lorry loaders to prevent them from being used without the stabiliser legs deployed.

‘The statement was handled very badly,’ says Wilson Paton, managing director of Outreach, which distributes Jonsered Loglift and Palfinger machines in the UK. ‘It was clumsy, inappropriate and ill-mannered,’ he adds.

Having already entered into a dialogue with the officials, ALLMI was waiting to hear how the HSE would answer its 15 key objections. Its members found out by reading about it in the trade press. In their view, what had until then been a dialogue appeared to have become a media campaign.

Today, seven months later, the dialogue with ALLMI has resumed and the HSE has backed away from talking to the media. Nobody from the HSE was available to talk directly to Cranes Today on this matter, the officials preferring to respond by email to written questions sent via the HSE press office.

The first question was why had the HSE decided to issue a press release declaring stabiliser interlocks mandatory for all new lorry loader cranes. The HSE response was that ‘this medium was chosen to reach the widest possible audience. HSE had already held discussions with ALLMI on this issue’.

The effect of reaching such a wide audience was to throw the industry into a panic. ‘In the first few weeks after the press announcement we were bombarded with questions from our customers – and we had no answers,’ says David Gardner, managing director of Partek Cargotec (Hiab) in the UK. ‘To this day we’ve had no formal communication with the HSE on this at all.’

Wilson Paton at Outreach confirms that he has heard nothing directly from HSE, and Doug Dyson, chairman of ALLMI, says he knows of no lorry loader supplier in the UK that has.

The HSE position is that ‘while no official notification of this decision has been issued, HSE has continued to work with ALLMI on this issue’. Progress towards a resolution has been delayed, though, by the prosecution of Adrian Wood’s employer, Meynell Plant Hire (see News), a process which neither HSE nor ALLMI wanted to prejudice. However, throughout this hiatus, HSE has stuck to its insistence that ‘EHSR 1.3.1…needs to be satisfied for lorry loader cranes. The stability requirements can be addressed by the use of stabiliser interlocks or equivalent engineering solutions’.

The HSE’s contention back in August 2001 that interlocks or equivalent devices ‘must’ be fitted to lorry loaders if they are to conform to the requirements of the Supply of Machinery regulations, hinged on a phrase in the legislation that requires that lorry loaders sold into the UK market are ‘manufactured within the state of the art’.

Nobody denies that such devices do exist. Danish manufacturer HMF has developed a system, called EVS, which uses inclinometers to detect excess turning forces and interrupt the use of the crane. Austrian firm Palfinger also has a system which can detect when the stabilisers are properly deployed, and can prevent the crane slewing over the side of the vehicle if the stabilisers are not. Other manufacturers are also believed to have comparable systems in development.

‘State of the art’ is a buzz-phrase much over-used by manufacturers keen to establish themselves at the forefront of their industry. In this instance, however, it seems that the phrase has backfired. ‘Certain manufacturers have advertised that devices like this are available, but no manufacturers fit them as standard,’ says ALLMI chairman Doug Dyson. According to Wilson Paton, ‘At least one manufacturer has started back-tracking on claims that it can offer interlock systems because, in fact, no manufacturer can offer these systems across the whole range of their models.’

‘State of the art’ has no dictionary definition. It is therefore open to interpretation and a recipe for confusion. ALLMI quotes the CEN definition as ‘the developed state of technical possibilities, at a given time, relating to products, processes and services, as based on scientific knowledge, technology and experience’. That is still open to interpretation and could equally apply to that other favourite buzz-phrase, ‘leading edge’.

According to HSE, ‘State of the art can be interpreted as what is technically achievable at the given time. HSE is aware of certain lorry loader cranes in general use with stabiliser interlocks. In the Meynell case the defendants accepted that it was both reasonable and practicable to have fitted interlocks to the type of vehicle involved. Indeed such interlocks are now in everyday use on the vehicle.’

ALLMI’s position, however, is that a device cannot be considered state of the art unless it is available across the entire range of products. If the technology is still so new that no manufacturer has developed, tested, and put into full production a reliable system that can be fitted to every model in the range, then it is pointless to demand that every machine be fitted with it.

All lorry loader cranes made and sold in Europe carry the CE mark as evidence that they have been designed and built within the state of the art and in accordance with harmonised European Standards.

‘There are relevant European standards and this facility [the fitting of stabiliser interlocks] is not demanded by them,’ says David Gardner. ‘Still, we referred the matter to Hiab Europe in Sweden because we wanted to be sure. The answer which came back was clear: These Euro Norms have been many years in the making. Interlocks were considered but were not included.’

Gardner’s opinion gets the support of Peter Oram, former HSE crane expert and currently chairman of the European crane standards committee, CEN TC147. ‘We are hoping that manufacturers will develop state of the art systems, but none of them has yet. There are a whole lot of reasons why it is not technically feasible at the moment,’ he says.

According to Oram, one system which has been used in the UK has been banned in Germany. ‘It’s too dangerous’, he says. ‘As far as I am concerned, as chairman of the European Standard, it is not state of the art.’

Many European manufacturers share this opinion of their own systems. Lars Andersson, Hiab’s chief engineer with responsibility for control systems, says: ‘We supply such devices if requested, but very few people have asked for them… we definitely do not consider them to be state of the art.’

Kai Busch, area sales manager for Atlas-Terex, formerly Atlas Weyhausen, says: ‘We have supplied the odd crane with such interlocks – for example we have done that for British Telecom in the UK – but we do not supply them on every crane and I wouldn’t say that that we can supply all our cranes with it.’

Busch adds: ‘The UK’s Health & Safety Executive is sometimes ahead of developments in the rest of Europe. For example, it led the way for the use of rated capacity indicators and height warning systems which were mandatory in the UK long before the Machinery Directive came in. Only now, with the introduction of the new Standard (PR EN12999) are they mandatory in the rest of Europe.’

One thing that can be said about the state of the art is that it is always changing and stabiliser interlocks probably will be universally accepted as state of the art sooner or later. As Busch suggests, the UK’s HSE is probably driving this process. But where harmonised European standards already exist and are currently accepted in every other European member state, change can only be affected through negotiation and agreement at Commission level.

‘A member state cannot refuse to accept the CE Mark and go its own way. It is clearly a nonsense,’ says Outreach managing director Wilson Paton. ‘It is up to the HSE to go to the authorities in Europe and put its case through the official channels,’ he says.

The HSE responds that, to date, it has had no need to refer to the European Commission. ‘Any notification …would need to be on behalf of the UK (the Department of Trade & Industry has the policy lead, the HSE is the enforcing authority). However, the UK has not notified the European Commission because it has not taken action to restrict or prohibit the supply of lorry loader cranes in the UK.’

Since the circulation of that press release last summer, things have moved on significantly. Meynell Plant Hire was fined £25,000 ($36,000) for breaching Regulation 8 of LOLER 1998. The HSE has accepted an invitation from ALLMI to discuss the issue with European manufacturers when they converge for the CEN crane standards committee meeting near Ivalo in Finland this month.

Most of the industry, meanwhile, acknowledges that stabiliser interlocks will one day become mandatory for all lorry loaders in the EU. ‘We don’t want to drag the HSE through the mire. We just want a workable solution,’ says Doug Dyson. ‘We all see it as inevitable. All the manufacturers are looking at this and they each want to be first off the starting blocks.’