I have a friend who’s an OTR trucker. He said he will haul any freight except “suicide coils.”
According to him, “suicide coils” are large coils of steel that are rolled onto (and then secured to) a flatbed truck. Like this, this, and this. He said that, if he were to get into a wreck, there’s a good chance the coils will break free from their restraints, roll to the cab, and crush him to death.
I’m not an ME or physicists, but I can certainly understand how this could happen.
I asked him why the coils are not positioned 90 degrees, or laid flat. He said they sometimes are, but it’s more expensive and time-consuming to position them that way; in their “suicide” position, they are simply rolled on and secured.
So here’s my question: if it’s as dangerous as it seems, why hasn’t the DOT banned the practice of simply “rolling on” and securing large, steel coils onto flatbed trucks ?
Well, if you position them the other way then they could break loose in a crash and kill a whole buncha people in the lane to the side. That’s a tough cargo no matter how you look at it.
When I was a courier (owner/operator of a Chevy van) I had to go pick up a 600 lb length of bronze. We’re talking about a 3.5 feet long 6 inch diameter solid metal piece here. Guy brought it out, just the big piece of metal between the forks and he just dump rolled that fucking thing into the back of my ten foot long van bed. I looked at him and said “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s a death sentence waiting to happen, now get it the hell out of there and get it on a skid properly!” Made him climb in back, roll that mess back onto his forklift and put it on a pallet properly and strap it down securely before allowing him to put it back in there, this time with the long axis running along the length of the bed in case it managed to cut loose so it could only roll from side to side instead of flying up to hit my seat or back to hit the doors and dump out on a following car. That guy was a fucking idiot.
Coils like that are 10s of thousands of pounds each. Without some sort of tool like a pallet or spindle, you’ll never be able to get under them to lift them off if laid flat, especially without damage. These tools would need to be taken back to the coil distribution point empty at a lose. The tools would have to be sturdy and, in the end, reduce the carrying capacity of the truck. It is much easier to lift & lower a ring from the top than the bottom.
There are three ways coils can be loaded, suicide, as you describe, shotgun (vertical to the trailer), and eye to the sky (laid flat on one end). In a crash with enough force to move the coil, there’s a chance it will roll forward if suicide style or to the side if shotgun. Either carries the potential to do great harm, whether to the cab and driver or to a passing vehicle and its passengers.
Loading coils eye to the sky is probably safest, but not all customers (probably most) have the equipment to unload those so situated – you’ve got to be able to get something underneath the coil to lift them. And they would need to be placed on a platform or pallet of some sort.
The key is ensuring the coils are safely secured to the trailer, and that receives the greater scrutiny. In sum, of the two most used loading methods, nether is safer. And, in fact, many drivers prefer suicide loading because those are easier to restrain and take less time.
Also, coils are not rolled on. They are lifted by cranes and placed on the trailers so as not to damage the customer’s steel (or tin).
The chaining methods that are in use now work. As with anything, though, they aren’t failsafe. Crashes occur and property damage results. But actual deaths from coils rolling from trailers are extremely rare.
They are fine so long as they are properly chocked and chained down so that they cannot move. After a few miles, the driver would probably stop and put some more tension on the chains because they are only safe if they are solid. It also helps to have a driver who knows how to drive.
I used to carry coils of electric cable. You may have seen the big wooden cotton reels that they wind it around. Some coils could weigh 8,000 kilos and I could put three on the bed. The fork-lift guy would lower them onto two 4 by 4’s so that they were held clear of the truck bed; then I would use three chains, each one rated at 2000kg hooked to the chassis of the truck and not to the side of the bed. One chain straight across and one to stop forward motion; the other to stop it rolling back. You can be sure that I avoided hard braking and was very gentle pulling off on an uphill grade.
You may think that 3 x 2,000 is less than 8,000, but that doesn’t matter so long as the coils don’t start moving.
I never minded coils; what I hated was sheet steel.
It is pretty specific on the securement requirements.
The fact that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations have a section that specifically address metal coils indicates that USDOT/FMCSA is aware of their particular danger.
Here is the part of the regulations that deals with load securement, starting at 393.100. The first sections deal with general load securement. Beginning at 393.116, there are additional requirements for particularly dangerous loads, including metal rolls and coils.
Asking as a lay person and a carpenter, why can’t two or three 4”x4” posts be affixed to one side of the spool so they can be easily forklifted and loaded “eye to the sky”?
One of my aunt’s ex-husbands was in a bus carrying soldiers which had a head-on collision with a truck carrying pine logs. The long poles went through the truck cab, then into the bus, impaling a number of people including her ex husband, killing them instantly.
Poles and pipes are another kind of problem. I have carried pipes arranged in a typical 5,4,3,2,1 stack on the trailer. As they loaded them they put rubber strips between each layer to stop then sliding forward. The first three layers were pretty safe anyway because they were right up against the headboard but the top two layers relied on friction, once they were strapped down, to stop what happened with the logs above.
Coils like this are mostly handled and processed vertically. Laying coils flat and back up again is done using a coil rotator. It’s not a big deal to turn a coil but avoid if you can. It’s easier to rotate them down after slitting to a smaller size.
The trucks are loaded that way because it’s easier to load and unload the freight. Full frontal collisions against something solid enough to snap the chains aren’t too likely. But possible.
And yet you see ambitious tinycars do it constantly–you’d think their only aspiration in life is to become a smeary hood ornament. They’re sublimely unaware of any of the laws of physics and most especially of the whole “F=MA” equation. Truckers who live to be old are the unsung heroes of the world, they’ve beaten ALL the odds!
Or maybe it’s just not significantly more dangerous than other types of cargo. A head-on collision that’s violent enough to loose a 30,000-pound roll of steel would probably also loose 30,000 pounds of steel bars oriented front-to-back on the trailer, sending them through the cab in the same manner. The hazard to the driver in each of these scenarios requires the truck to undergo in a very direct head-on collision with something massive enough to decelerate an 80,000 pound truck very rapidly. That’s a pretty rare type of collision for a truck. A truck driver who can’t stop in time may rear-end other vehicles, but the vehicle he’s most likely to hit is a car, the mass of which is very small compared to the mass of the truck; such a collision will be extremely violent for the car occupants, not at all so for the truck driver or his cargo.
Back in the 70’s when my dad owned and operated a truck stop, the loads I most often heard truckers complaining about as difficult to transport safely were: 1) swinging meat (beef or pork carcasses hanging from hooks inside the box trailer); 2) live cattle; 3) PVC pipe (light, but difficult to secure without crushing the pipes); and 4) liquids in unbaffled tanks. The first two were a challenge because of the way the weight would shift when negotiating curves, and the fourth because of the sloshing front to back when accelerating/decelerating. Even when parked, the trucks with unbaffled liquid loads would rock back and forth several feet each way until everything settled down, and that sometimes took awhile. I can’t imagine trying to drive with something like that behind me!
In this accident the truck driver was not one of the fatalities and the details of the accident are not consistent with the OP.
Steel coils on trucks are such a common sight around here I scarcely notice it anymore, and I’ve never heard of an accident happening as described in the OP.
Trucks carry stuff heavy enough to kill the driver all the time - I mean, that’s what trucks are for. The scenario as described in the OP would be extraordinarily unlikely, not just because coils aren’t that hard to secure, but because to make this even theoretically possible one needs to theorize a collision whereby
The vehicle strikes or is stricken by something essentially head on, creating forward inertia,
That stops the tractor at a much higher rate of deceleration than the trailer, but not the things ON the trailer,
In such a manner as to cause the coils, which are extremely heavy, to violently be thrown from their chocks/chains and be propelled a very substantial distance forward into the tractor with enough force to destroy it,
But this collision would not have killed the driver anyway.
