Overturned artic in Croydon laden with 29T of hanging meat

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Overturned artic in Croydon laden with 29T of hanging meat

Post by MGC » Fri Dec 18, 2015 7:49 pm

The driver of this Volvo didn't manage to get around the roundabout. The high centre of gravity and nature of the swinging load, coupled with speed, resulted in the combination overturning just by the wall. It hit the pavement and kerb quite hard, compromising the strength of the box.

Anyone that has dealt with a situation like this will know that righting nearly 30T of hanging meat in a fibre glass box with little or no strength when on its side is particularly difficult. The box is designed to keep its strength by its shape rather than the material used. The sides and roof etc are glued together and the material used is, as mentioned earlier, a resin/fibre glass sheet.

It is always the intention to keep the load on the vehicle as removal takes a long time, a lot of manpower and more or less renders the whole lot unfit for anything other than disposal. It is a particularly unpleasant task to remove that many carcasses; they are heavy, awkward and tangled up with meat-hooks etc along a slippery surface. They then have to be lifted up into an awaiting vehicle before being taken for disposal.

We set up both rotators and spent some time getting a start under the corner of the trailer. If you look at the images, you can see that the side is flat on the ground making it virtually impossible to get anything between it and the road surface. Once we do start to work 'under the side', we monitor how the trailer is behaving and make decisions based upon this information.

This time we opted to remove the tractor unit, right it and place it out of the way. Remove the trailer legs and remove the large cargo boxes that were bolted under the floor of the trailer. The result of this decision means that when righting the trailer, the N/S/F corner would never leave the ground, dramatically reducing the load imposed on the sides and edges of the trailer by the lifting straps. We also arranged for Ashford Recovery to bring their air bags to provide a greater spread of effort across the side.

The downside of taking the tractor unit off the trailer is the fact that the front can slide towards the rotator. We counteracted this by use of one of the boom winches running back from a tree in the nearby park. We calculated that the box would be around 6 inches from the side of the rotator when righted. It was just possible to get your hand between the two!

The lifting frame was set up and the 1075 was used to raise the front of the trailer before an awaiting tractor unit was connected. The legs etc were refitted and the trailer/load was taken by the operator.

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