The footage — only a minute of it — is scary. It shows a truck, a semi-trailer, on a flyover, careering around a bend. The truck driver, you’d think, is aware that he is speeding. What he is not aware of is that he is speeding out of control. His trailer at the back has literally lost the plot. It has stopped trying to keep up with the main part of the vehicle that’s pulling it along.
As the vehicle reaches the mid-point in the arc of the bend, the trailer wheels on the left (as one is viewing the footage) leave the ground, and once they do so, all stability is lost. It spins in the air once, still attached to the truck. As it spins and is lifted, it sideswipes any and everything in its way. Pylons, embankments, lamp posts (which fold and crumple like origami models being redesigned.)
It is one minute of mayhem before this juggernaut comes to a standstill. Two cars in the parallel lane just joining the bend also, somehow manage to brake in time. In this way, they become ring-side viewers of the incident as it unfolds. A few cars ahead in the same lane manage to escape the wildly out-of-control truck. They, of course, don’t stay around to see what’s happening.
In one minute, it’s the equivalent of the earth losing its momentum as it spins and, for that little while, the entire system is thrown out of whack. For, after all, as we all know, the highways too are based on a system which, if for some reason is not adhered to, can end up looking like this.
Usually, in situations such as this, there’s blood on the asphalt. And fatalities. In this instance, everyone got away scot free. That’s the biggest plus anyone can take out of a systemic breakdown: That no lives were lost in the aberration.
On a rotational basis
It is nearly a year now since the incident occurred and nobody knows the count more accurately than the truck driver himself. This is because he has been ticking things off on his wall calendar. When I say ‘things’ I don’t mean random items ... but just each week, on the Wednesday. This is that midweek point when the truck company holds its weekly seminar on safety. It is an occasion that’s been endorsed by all the truck companies in the local area. All their drivers who are not on the road attend the meeting. All the meetings are chaired on a rotational basis by one safety officer from each of the truck companies. Tea and biscuits on the side.
Sounds like a good thing. Sounds like a good time is being had by one and all, in the promotion of safety. Just as some meetings open with a famous quote, or a brief pep-talk intro by a CEO, or a prayer, these meetings commence in identical fashion every Wednesday afternoon. A screen on the wall projects the ‘one-minute’ footage for all the drivers assembled to take in, again. When the screening ends 60 seconds later, the guilty truck driver tells his fellowmen, “That was me. I was acting like a total idiot.”
Some of those gathered give him a look that says, ‘Now we know what an idiot looks like.’ Others just stare at him blankly, their expressions inscrutable. Fifty-one times he’s said the words. One meeting more and he’ll be free, in a sense. His punishment, as ordered by management, will be over. And he’ll be free to get behind the wheel of a truck once more and bid farewell to the demotion — truck washing and maintenance for a whole year, on a reduced salary.
Will it be daunting to get behind the wheel once more? He thinks not. It’s not every day, after all, you hear a voice in your hands-free headpiece screaming, “Get home as quickly as you can. Kerrie’s gone and done something to herself.” Kerrie being his teenage daughter.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
