November/December 2013
Winners of ISRI’s first transportation safety awards share how they help drivers keep accident rates low.
By Erin Rigik
Transporting scrap is an important part of any recycler’s operation, and doing so safely is a job worth rewarding. ReMA handed out its inaugural Transportation Safety Awards this year to recognize members for their outstanding commitment to the safety of their employees and the public through progressive, effective fleet safety programs.
The Best Fleet Award recognized the ReMA members with the lowest vehicle accident rates and the lowest U.S. Department of Transportation (Washington, D.C.) recordable accident rates in 2012. The Pacesetter Award used the same criteria as the Best Fleet Award, but it looked at a three-year period from January 2010 to December 2012. ReMA presented the awards to winners in four size categories—based on total miles driven per fleet—in April at the ReMA convention and exposition in Orlando, Fla.
One goal of the awards is to highlight the role of driver behavior in ensuring safety. For example, a 2006 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Washington, D.C.) found that driving too fast caused 67 percent of single-vehicle truck accidents in the United States and 57 percent of multivehicle truck accidents. Driver distraction is also a problem: In a 2005 DOT study, 48 percent of all drivers interviewed reported experiencing a near-miss, such as drifting out of the lane, while using a cell phone or tuning the radio. Driver fatigue, unrealistic demands by shippers, pressure to deliver on time, speed, and poor training for new drivers also are risk factors for crashes, according to the report.
Scrap caught up with some of the Transportation Safety Award winners to find out more about how they accomplish such strong driving records and identified several common policies and procedures among the winning fleets:
They hire drivers carefully and work to keep them. OmniSource Transport in Fort Wayne, Ind., won the Pacesetter Award and came in first in the Best Fleet Award in the large class category (more than 5 million miles a year). Lisa Merkle, OmniSource’s Department of Transportation compliance manager, says the company strives to operate “safely or not at all,” and that starts with its hiring and training practices. The company looks at applicants’ driving records for the previous three years, and any critical violation during that time—which includes driving 15 mph or more over the speed limit, an improper lane change, or following too closely—is an automatic disqualifier from employment. “We have a pretty stringent hiring policy, so really our safety practice starts with that,” Merkle says. “It may take a little longer to fill the open position, but in the long run, the benefits” in driver retention and the company’s safety record “outweigh the time delay.”
Darrin Hardy, operations manager for Industrial Services of America (Louisville, Ky.), credits his company’s lack of turnover in both drivers and mechanics for its strong safety record. ISA received the Pacesetter Award and first place in the Best Fleet Award in the intermediate class category (500,001 to 1 million miles per year). One way the company reduces turnover is by hiring candidates with scrap industry experience. “It’s relatively easy to find [commercial driver’s license] drivers and diesel mechanics, but with the unique challenges that the scrap industry presents on drivers and equipment, that experience is crucial,” Hardy says. “The materials that we’re hauling, sometimes it’s very unstable, sometimes it’s a very dense payload that doesn’t have any forgiveness—it’s not like hauling a semi-load of cereal boxes. The weight may be the same, but the way it reacts to turns and stops is different. Dumping the loads can also sometimes be very difficult—like if the material doesn’t want to slide out—and if it gets stuck, you have to react quickly and know what to do, and that comes with experience.”
David Poltzer, corporate transportation manager for The Newark Group, a paper recycling company based in Cranford, N.J., also attributes his company’s low accident rate in part to its low employee turnover rate, which he puts at less than 5 percent. “We treat our people right, we have good work schedules and good trucks,” he says. Thanks to that low turnover, there aren’t a lot of new drivers who might struggle with a new route. Newark won the Pacesetter Award and came in first in the Best Fleet Award in the medium class category (1,000,001 to 5 million miles per year).
They use a variety of individual and group training techniques. Schnitzer Northeast (Everett, Mass.), a division of Schnitzer Steel Industries (Portland, Ore.), won the Pacesetter Award and first place in the Best Fleet Award in the small class category (300,000 to 500,000 miles per year). The company’s driver safety program, which provides initial and ongoing training for its drivers, makes clear its high expectations. “We look at it like this: How you drive is about personal and public safety,” says Paula Esty, quality, environment, health, and safety assurance manager. “We go over safe driving practices like planning ahead, watching speed, eliminating distractions, looking ahead, scanning, and road conditions. In the training programs, we reiterate things that they should be doing every day.”
The company holds weekly safety meetings as well as monthly “toolbox talks,” where managers open up communication with employees by discussing lessons learned from any incidents or challenges on the road. Other safety training topics include seasonal road conditions and driving in their yards as well as at customers’ properties. “We look at every scenario our driver could be in,” Esty says. “Driving and safety aren’t two separate topics, they are the same thing, and that’s how we do it every day.” Schnitzer monitors drivers’ performance, and drivers also might receive individual coaching or have supervisors ride along with them.
The Newark Group’s drivers learn the company’s safety expectations up front in an orientation session, which consists of five hours of classroom instruction and three hours on the road, plus training in pre- and post-trip truck inspections and dropping and hooking trailers. One of the tools the company has been using in the past year is the Decision Driving Program from its insurance company, Liberty Mutual (Boston), which Poltzer says has been “very helpful in maintaining safety.” The program consists of five sections: expanding your look-ahead capacity by anticipating what’s going to happen and looking for hazards; sizing up what’s around you using peripheral vision and mirrors; signaling intentions early with turn signals, the horn, and occasionally with hand signals; driving defensively, which includes leaving yourself an out if a driver ahead stops short or cuts into your lane; and taking decisive action, which means putting everything together and doing it. Poltzer goes over the program with every driver individually.
Newark conducts ride-alongs with new drivers, and it does the same once a year with existing drivers. Typically Poltzer or a local plant manager will spend half a day with a driver observing his or her habits. “It sends a signal to the employees that we care about what they’re doing and we’re interested in what they’re doing, and that helps,” Poltzer says.
OmniSource monitors driver trends and builds ongoing training sessions around what might be happening on the road, Merkle says. For example, if the company notices a trend in tire failures, it will conduct a safety presentation on low air, bad tires, and how to do proper tire safety checks. Similarly, when several drivers experienced injuries when opening shipping containers, the company looked at different types of bars used to open them, and through driver feedback it determined which worked best to keep drivers safe.
Its quarterly driver safety meetings look at big-picture topics such as preparing for winter driving conditions; monthly meetings might include reminders about watching engine fluids; and weekly meetings might provide updates on company policy. OmniSource also addresses the importance of drivers maintaining their health, such as by getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising.
ISA emphasizes its “Safety is No. 1” message through training, daily morning meetings, and safety bulletins, Hardy says. Morning meetings might alert drivers to weather and road conditions or that school is back in session, thus drivers should be on the lookout for children, buses, and additional cars on the road. The company also conducts monthly driver-safety meetings with an outside consultant. An upcoming meeting will address preparing for winter driving conditions; others have covered new federal regulations and findings of recent truck accident investigations at their company and elsewhere. “We want to make sure everyone gets the same message,” Hardy says, “and when you can give people real-life examples, they listen, they can relate.”
Many of them put drivers on dedicated routes. OmniSource has more than 80 facilities and employs about 360 commercial drivers, most of whom travel between 300 and 450 miles a day on surface streets and highways along dedicated routes. Newark Group drivers similarly travel along static routes, visiting the same locations on a regular basis. “There aren’t a lot of surprises,” Poltzer says. “They’re not going to cities or locations they haven’t been to before, so they’re familiar and they don’t get into troublesome situations.” The company has 70 trucks, and drivers work day shifts of no more than 11 hours a day and 10 hours between dispatches, per federal regulations. Most drive local routes totaling less than 300 miles a day.
ISA employs 18 drivers who operate about 20 trucks. The company has a roll-off fleet, which travels to different local vendors every day within a 75-mile radius. For its tractor-trailer fleet, which hauls finished metal products to mills, drivers typical travel the same 400-mile route each workday.
They investigate crashes and near-misses. Accident investigation and communicating those findings to drivers are key elements of ISA’s safety practices. “It is my opinion that every accident is avoidable, so when we do have an accident or even a near-miss, we investigate and share with everyone what we learned,” says Hardy, who notes that the company has had zero accidents in the past 24 months.
OmniSource also investigates all driver-related incidents, including those that happen at the scrapyard and those that don’t involve injury or another vehicle. “Even if an accident wasn’t our fault, we want to drill down deeper and find out what we could have done differently,” Merkle says, by asking questions such as, “Do we need to focus on driver awareness, or night driving, or do we need to train differently to encourage prevention?”
They have well-defined policies for certain behaviors. Newark Group’s policies spell out the company’s safety expectations. “If [drivers] have a preventable accident, which we rule on, the minimum [reprimand] would be a warning letter,” and then a three-day suspension, “but it could also result in a termination depending on the severity of the accident,” Poltzer says. He often tells drivers at orientation, “If you pass a school bus [when] the safety arm is out and you hurt somebody, I don’t care if it’s your first accident, you’re out of here.” All four companies interviewed have policies that prohibit drivers from using cell phones while driving.
The drivers take ownership of the condition of their vehicles. OmniSource drivers conduct pre- and post-trip inspections on their trucks, checking everything from the brakes to lights to tires, and everything in between. They submit two inspection reports daily, plus additional reports if there are any changes to the truck’s condition or if there is an incident. Schnitzer’s drivers also check their trucks daily with pre- and post-trip inspections to make sure they are operating correctly.
They monitor vehicles remotely. Newark uses an onboard computer program called Xata to monitor driver safety, which Poltzer says has been one of its most helpful tools. It’s a GPS system that also tracks driver logs, fuel reports, speed, and accelerations and decelerations. It sends nearly real-time updates to Poltzer and a driver’s plant manager via e-mail and cell phone when a driver’s behavior falls outside preset safety parameters, such as if a driver doesn’t take the federally required 30-minute break on an eight-hour shift, or if there is a sudden deceleration during a trip.
“Decelerations could indicate a variety of things, like distracted driving, following too close for conditions, or just not paying attention,” Poltzer says. It also could happen because another vehicle cut off the truck, or a deer ran into the road and there was nothing the driver could do about it. Newark’s drivers average about three sudden decelerations a month, but if a driver goes over that number, management takes note. Poltzer says that about three years ago, one driver “was locking up his breaks nearly every day, so we knew something was wrong. We brought him in and counseled him, and it cleared right up. Once the drivers understand the power of that onboard computer, it gets their attention, and it’s kind of a ‘scared straight’ thing.”
OmniSource uses a similar onboard computer system to track driver safety and analyze trends, which it currently is implementing in its trucks. Its system also shows drivers their next destination, but Merkle says early feedback from several employees identified a problem: They reported that their fingers were too big to properly navigate the small screen’s prompts. With that feedback, OmniSource gave some drivers stylus pens so they could interact with the system as intended. Merkle says drivers like using it more now, which makes the program and its safety features all the more efficient.
Erin Rigik is a writer based in Chicago. Scrap editor Deirdre Bannon contributed to this article.
More Than Three Decades of Safe Driving
ISRI singled out an exceptional driver for its inaugural Safe Driver of the Year Award. Bill Willis, a driver with Grossman Iron & Steel Co. (St. Louis), took the honor for his remarkable individual driving record: When he received the award at ISRI’s convention and exposition in April, Willis had logged more than 1.5 million miles over his 35-year career without incurring a single preventable accident. Those numbers are now edging toward 36 years and 1.6 million miles, respectively. At the convention, Willis received a trophy, certificate, leather jacket, congratulatory letter, and $500 check as well as travel and lodging at the convention hotel.
Willis got his start in the industry working at a steelyard in Missouri in the early 1970s, but when that job “dried up,” Willis says, his brother got him a job as a driver for Finer Metals in the St. Louis area. Two years later, in 1978, Willis landed a job at Grossman Iron & Steel, where he’s been ever since. “I wanted to work as a driver because I knew I could have more freedom,” Willis says. “I knew I didn’t want to be closed up in an office or manufacturing plant.” He typically serves the same customers every day, driving back and forth several times a day, totaling about 200 miles on city streets and highways.
“Trucks are bigger, wider, and heavier than everyday vehicles, and what I like best about being a driver is being able to control the truck in a safe manner,” Willis says. “In everyday traffic, you have to see so much—you have to constantly be alert and looking ahead to get the big picture.” One thing he doesn’t like, however, is rain. “People drive funny in the rain—it’s worse than snow,” he says.
Willis is modest about his achievements and credits his cautious nature for his safety record. “My big fear is that something would come out of the box and damage the box or hurt someone,” he says. “Being aware of that constantly is one of the reasons for my good driving record. That, and I make sure I get plenty of rest every night.” He keeps a very strict sleep schedule, going to bed and waking up at the same time every day.
Willis starts his days at Grossman by carefully inspecting his truck from top to bottom,
including making sure the windows are clean, the lights are working and are clear, and that all the mechanics in the truck and cab are functioning properly. He recalls a time he lost his steering tire on the highway, but before it burst or caused an accident, another driver radioed him that the tire’s air was going down. Willis was able to safely pull off to the side of the road, but ever since that incident, he checks his tires five or six times a day.
What advice would he give his fellow drivers? Look 10 or 15 cars ahead, not just five, he says; change lanes a mile or more ahead so as not to maneuver over at the last moment; and always be aware of your surroundings. And he advises drivers to take care of their health, exercise, and get to the doctor at the first sign of illness. Above all, he says, “Be safe!”
—Deirdre Bannon
Winners of ISRI’s first transportation safety awards share how they help drivers keep accident rates low.