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switchlogic:
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Oh Gawd Luke has resorted to posting in morse code
…—… 
This guy was an accident waiting to happen…
When it did for the umpteenth time, an innocent mother lost her life.
There has to be a way to track poor drivers like this and re-train or ban them BEFORE they go on to kill people. I’m not a great lover of insurance companies but, if they can keep tabs on drivers who have multiple accidents and endorsements then they should start doing so. A database that can be referenced at interview stage for agency and employer so that BillyBigWheels and his appalling driving record can be taken into consideration before he’s given a job.
I feel a greedy agency has put in a driver who clearly couldn’t give a toss about anyone except himself and to my mind should never have been loading and driving this kind of load.
makes my blood boil
Reef:
Update:Driver jailed for 4 years. dailymail.co.uk/news/article … years.html
Especially like the “driver was using his mobile phone as a satnav” very poignant and relative to the case in hand, [zb]ing DM hacks!
Oh and that loading / strapping was also atrocious
According to the ■■■■ poor Daily Wail article, the post was ‘meant to hold the load secure’…
Words fail me. It only serves to indicate what a crap ‘paper’ the Wail is, and that no other articles in it can be trusted or believed.
Reef:
switchlogic:
…Oh Gawd Luke has resorted to posting in morse code
…—…
Perhaps CF finds it hard to argue in morse code! 
Evil8Beezle:
Perhaps CF finds it hard to argue in morse code!
I’m sure that you don’t for one second believe that Evil. I feel that a demonstration will soon be along!
raymundo:
(- = dash, . = dot)
I’m so glad you provided a cipher key 
raymundo either you’re dozy in disguise or you need to go over your morse code a bit
probably, but there will be someone who will have to try to decipher it 
It was annoying as I knew/remembered some of the letters but not all so I had to look up the ones I didn’t, which isn’t bad seeing as I was like 10yrs old (maybe) when I had those walkie talkies with the morse code written on them
I was taught an easy way to remember what were dots an wot were dashes years ago but then morse was dropped from the requirements of holding a radio ops cert and it aint like riding a bike, you can and do forget !!
I remember, some years ago, a ‘driver’ who killed someone when his brakes failed. It turned out that his low-air warning buzzer had been going off, so he pulled the wires off because it was annoying him.
Daily Fail:
He was so keen to return home that he failed to lock the stabiliser fitted to his flat-bed vehicle which was supposed to be holding the metal fencing in place.
The pictures in the same article clearly show what is actually holding the fencing in place… Journalism is definitely a lazy man’s job it seems.
Quickly ran our of any sympathy for the driver really.
However, quite a bit of negligence on the part of the crane manufacturers. Even though older there have always been plenty of simple mechanical engineering solutions that could stop an entirely foreseeable operator error ending in tragedy. A system of having to crank out the outriggers with a handle so they wouldn’t slide in and out under gravity for instance.
Seems topsy turvy too that you have the authorities getting their knickers in a twist over strapping pallets of bog rolls in curtainsiders whilst overlooking the fact designs like this remain approved for highway use.
Re: the post by nurglets.
So he’d been doing the job for 10 years and never was trained or had the bloody nouse to realise that things like that that ain’t chained, strapped or locked with a pin, could move about.
As for the crane truck. I was dead lucky with the same thing on an old crane. I must have been distracted by something and not secured the near side leg. Front mounted crane, so pretty hard to spot in the mirror. Lucky for me it was a road where no one walked along and it was bin day the next day. No real footpath, just a grass verge. The first I knew anything was wrong was when I heard an almighty bang and looked in the n/s mirror to see a wheelie bin full of crap spinning through the air. I have to say it was an impressive sight, bit like a catherine wheel. I stopped, ran round, shoved leg in and made sure it was pinned properly and scooted off… quickly.
Was reported in the Liverpool Echo that the driver had been sacked from his previous employer due to 3 counts of careless driving, it was a builders merchants driving a lorry mounted crane vehicle and he had been on two safety courses involving the safe use of a crane.
His barrister gave a sob story of his depression over the incident, the judge replied he had no remorse and he had blamed every one else except himself
When leaving court he smiled and waved at his mate in the gallery,
It looked like an old Atlas crane on the vehicle, and it could have had a secondary lock
fitted on for about £25 it’s a chain with two dog clips on and wraps around the leg on the top
I always had them fitted on my Hiab cranes, now the modern ones are hydraulically
operated. Block N Mesh the operator of the vehicle are quite a big company and I can’t understand why they never retrofitted a secondary locking system.
Intake/l39:
Was reported in the Liverpool Echo that the driver had been sacked from his previous employer due to 3 counts of careless driving, the operator of the vehicle are quite a big company and I can’t understand why they never retrofitted a secondary locking system.
To be fair the question is why weren’t the legs stowed and locked anyway and why was the alarm regards same ignored.‘If’ it’s true it’s the latter of those which seems to take it outside of the benefit of the doubt in this case and the judge should therefore have made an example of him by going for the full 14 years max sentence. 
alfa man:
This crane looks like an older atlas crane which will not have any alarms.
According to the report posted it did have an alarm which was stated as being ignored.
Court of Appeal rules that ‘indolent’ William Anthony Stewart’s original sentence was too light.
Lord Justice Davis commented: “This was a shocking case of dangerous driving, a heavy goods vehicle is in effect a very dangerous weapon”.
The sentence of four and a half years was far too light, he concluded, and the “least justifiable sentence, after a trial, was seven years”.
Article here… manchestereveningnews.co.uk/ … d-12331671
What the does using his mobile phone as a satnav have to do with ignoreing a warning beeper