There’s always a lot clambering in and out of council tip trucks as they scoot around their territory humping soil, dumping mulch or doing other duties.
The trouble is the crews who do the clambering are often risking injury if these busy workhorses don’t have decent access.
In fact Moreton Bay Regional Council was having just this problem with the 165 tip trucks it operates throughout its sprawling region north of Brisbane. 
“Guys constantly have to climb inside our trucks to check loads, sweep out, attend to skid-steers or maintain the interiors,” says Bruce Eckersley, Moreton Bay’s Coordinator of Heavy Fleet and Small Equipment. “It’s hard enough clambering into these trucks, but it’s even harder getting out because the sides are 1.1 metres high and aren’t exactly easy to throw a leg over.”
Both Eckersely and his Fleet Services Manager Warren Mashford were growing concerned at the injuries staff members were incurring as they used inadequate ladders to gain access to the trucks, or no ladders at all to make their exit.
“We would specify a need for ladders in our tender documents, but we found the average truck body builder’s concept of a safe and functional ladder didn’t match ours,” says Mashford. “So I asked Bruce to come up with a design we could build into our tender specs which would ensure efficiency and safety.”
That prompted Eckersley to go on site and climb in and out of trucks himself so he could experience the pitfalls first hand. He took a safety advisor with him and they compiled a wish-list of features which he then incorporated into a detailed engineering drawing of his “perfect” ladder.
Among the features he wanted were grip handles at the top of the truck body that could be grasped from either outside or inside. But he insisted they had to be flush with the truck’s side and have a grip-friendly recess behind them.
“That may sound picky,” says Eckersley “but body builders were giving us protruding, weld-on handles which were not only hard to grasp, but also got dislodged if the truck brushed against a tree trunk or some other obstruction. A missing handle could then mean a loss of three-point contact, namely a firm grip for both hands, along with a firm footing”
He then specified that the exterior steps of the ladder, which ran up the truck’s side, should have a recess behind them.
“This had a two fold purpose,” he says “firstly it provided more than just a toe-hold on the exterior steps, but each recess into the truck body would in turn serve as a step when exiting the interior.”
But wait, there’s more!
Eckersley also wanted the lower mounting steps to be hinged so they could tuck neatly under the body and thus avoid the sort of dislodgement risk that the protruding handles had suffered. Moreover, he wanted the structure in high tensile steel, with a 200kg step load, non-slip checker plate steps and the whole thing painted bright yellow so there could be no mistaking that “this is what you use!”
A tall order?
“Not so,” says Mashford “because Swiftco Truck Bodies on the Gold Coast came up with just what we wanted and our tip trucks are now a whole lot safer.
“But I want to stress that we don’t have a patent on this! In fact, we see local government as a fraternity that should share ideas. So anyone out there with the same problem that we had is welcome to pick up on this one.”