The potential for vehicle accidents is ever present, and is the Project’s most difficult risk to control.

Drivers of vehicles on your project will conduct much of their Work alone and unsupervised. It is not possible to directly supervise the drivers of a fleet of light and heavy duty vehicles, logging hundreds of thousands, if not millions of miles each month. Seamless, on-site supervision is never possible. Driver training, assessment, motivational and other risk control strategies are essential to reduce vehicle accidents.

Controlling Transportation risks can be significantly more challenging in countries where a Safe Driving Culture is absent, where the terrain outside the urban centers is rugged and roads are poorly constructed and maintained. In such countries, as Bolivia, Peru and China, the number of national road fatalities per million vehicles is more than ten times that of European countries, Japan, and Canada… which have well established Safe & Defensive Driving Cultures.

In whatever country your project will be undertaken, a well thought out Transportation Managment Plan (TMP) is essential to minimize vehicle accidents. A pro-active TMP to promote safe and defensive driving habits, and implement initiatives to reduce all project-specific transportation risks is essential.

The objective of your Transportation Management Plan is to get your drivers to take ownership of the Company Safe Driving Culture. This is a complex and labor intensive task, which involves careful planning starting at the initial project conception. Project drivers who log long hours of driving each month in extreme off-road driving terrain, are often recruited in urban centres with little or no off-road experience. They are processed through an afternoon of defensive and off-road driver training, then dispatched on Journeys to and in remote regions where there is no phone and intermittent GPS tracking, nor any radio coverage. Other obstacles thrown at them often include fog, snow, black ice, avalanches, landslides, falling rock, high altitude sickness, bandits, armed smugglers, kidnappers and/or narco-terrorists. In areas where these conditions exist, the implementation of a Journey Management System becomes a significant factor in ensuring that all your drivers return home safely at the end of each shift.

One of the primary objectives of your Transportation Management Plan will be to control the risks of a fleet of pipe trucks loading pipe joints in a railyard or shipyard, then hauling the pipe to temporary stockpile yards along the R.O.W., and subsequently, on local highways and narrow rural roads from the stockpile yards to the R.O.W. These pipe joints can be 12 meters or up to 20 meters long or more, each weighing more than ten tons. This pipe hauling is often contracted out to one or more different subcontracting companies. Successfully managing these subcontractors, the staff of whom may not wholeheartedly embrace the constraints of your Transportation Management Plan and Defensive Driving Culture, is a complex task. Meticulous planning, knowledge of lessons learned, review of every aspect of your pipe hauling plan, and coaching and training of subcontractor supervisory personel, is essential to preventing pipe truck highway accidents. This may include issues such as but not limited to the following:

• evaluation of the organization of on-site supervision
• consideration of the impact of salary structure on driving habits
• organization of drivers into teams to compete for H & S awards
• installation of GPS tracking hardware and speed control devices in pipe trucks
• Management of driver’s rest time to ensure adequate sleep
• Frequent and periodic rest stops incorporated into Journey Management
• Oxygen therapy and medical monitoring at extreme altitutes…

The use of light and heavy duty vehicles when transporting equipment and materiel must be permitted only under carefully controlled conditions and in accordance with procedures and guidelines established within a Transportation Management Plan which is strongly supported by site management.