Tank: Humboldt Broncos safety lessons seem forgotten in Saskatchewan

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The one positive that seemed to emerge from the Humboldt Broncos tragedy was a fresh focus on improving safety in the trucking industry.

The collision between the Broncos team bus and a semi-truck at a highway intersection that killed 16 people and injured another 13 laid bare the shocking flimsiness of safety rules in the trucking industry, including a lack of thorough driver training.

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In addition to the charges laid against the truck driver, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu — for which he pleaded guilty, was sentenced to eight years in prison and now faces deportation — the Calgary trucking company that employed Sidhu also faced legal consequences for the April 2018 crash.

Sukhmander Singh of now-defunct Adesh Deol Trucking pleaded guilty to five of eight charges, admitting he failed to comply with federal and provincial safety regulations. He was fined $5,000 and some wondered whether those fines would provide sufficient deterrence for others.

Saskatchewan introduced mandatory truck driver training a year after the Broncos tragedy.

Surely Saskatchewan’s highways are much safer more than six years after that horrific event. Surely we’ve learned the lessons from that awful tragedy, and safety violations now amount to a rare occurrence.

The reality, however, looks more like nothing was learned from the loss of those 16 lives.

Between July 7 and 13, as part of a safety blitz, the Saskatchewan Highway Patrol conducted 238 inspections of commercial vehicles. Only 43 per cent of them passed inspection. That’s not just a failing grade, it’s a blaring alarm when we’re talking about safety on our highways. At least, it should be.

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Forty per cent of those commercial vehicles were removed immediately from the roads. Another 17 per cent required repairs before they could return to the highway.

That should be frightening to anyone travelling on our roads. Perhaps that was just an aberration? Yet a three-day campaign in May conducted by the highway patrol and SGI yielded remarkably similar results.

Those inspections were done at the Langham weigh scale, about 30 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon along the Yellowhead Highway (16) and about 250 kms west of the site of the Broncos bus crash.

Only 45 per cent of the 332 commercial vehicles that were stopped passed inspection. Issues with brakes and the securing of cargo resulted in 103 vehicles getting removed from the road.

Sixteen drivers were also removed, for reasons like exceeding the permitted limit on hours, false records and licence endorsements, and drug impairment.

Another 81 vehicles were found to have mechanical defects that needed to be repaired immediately.

Only 148 vehicles and 82 trailers passed inspection and received decals for compliance.

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Provincial Public Safety Minister Paul Merriman said in a news release: “Saskatchewan residents need to feel they can travel safely on our highways and removing unsafe commercial vehicles from our roads is one way we accomplish that.”

But if you consider that two separate campaigns, months apart, yielded similar results where most commercial vehicles failed inspection, motorists have every reason to feel very unsafe on our highways.

According to numbers compiled by SGI, there were 1,437 collisions on Saskatchewan highways last year that involved commercial vehicles, or about five per cent of the 28,238 collisions.

These crashes resulted in 295 injuries (about five per cent of the 5,392 total injured) and 22 fatalities — an alarming 24 per cent of the total 92 deaths.

Over the last 10 years, fatalities from collisions involving commercial vehicles accounted for about 22 per cent of the average, while the total such collisions amounted to about five per cent on average.

SGI spokeswoman Michaela Solomon pointed out in an emailed reply that “just because a collision occurred with a commercial vehicle doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t road safe, and these statistics also don’t represent whether the commercial vehicle involved in these collisions was at fault.”

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But the 10-year pattern clearly establishes the disproportionate deadliness of collisions involving commercial vehicles. And most of those inspected recently were caught violating safety rules.

Any sense of security that somehow our highways became safe in the wake of the Broncos crash should be shattered.

Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

ptank@postmedia.com

twitter.com/thinktankSK

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