Editorial
It was a grisly sight: a lady crushed to death by an unlatched 40-feet container that fell off a truck in Ijesha area of Lagos penultimate week. She was one of the two fatalities of that mishap, which, according to the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA) occurred when the truck hauling the empty 40-feet container suffered brake failure and rammed into a stationary vehicle, upon which the container tipped over. The agency said whereas the truck driver was rescued and taken to hospital, two adult females died and their remains were removed to the mortuary. That incident having occurred at a named bus-stop, the dead persons were likely hapless standers-by when the truck came crashing.
The Ijesha, Lagos incident was just one of frequent mishaps by container trucks resulting in fatalities. In the closing days of July, three people died while six others sustained severe injuries when a 20-feet container fell on a commuter bus at Ilasamaja, Oshodi-Badagry Expressway. LASEMA reported that the container-laden truck collided with the commuter bus that was discharging its passengers under the Ilasamaja bridge at about 7 p.m. According to the agency, the accident resulted from the driver of the truck insisting on his right of way when he rammed into the commuter bus. One of the casualties was 27-year-old Chidinma Ajoku, a staff of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) who was being expected back from work that fateful night by her mother and aunty, until they were informed the following dawn that she was involved in a container crash. Their search for the victims yielded her body at Yaba General Hospital, along with that of another male passenger and the driver of the commuter bus who also died in the accident. The driver of the container truck bolted from the crash scene and wasn’t apprehended by the police until some three weeks after.
Earlier, in February, a 40-feet container-laden articulated vehicle tipped over at Ogudu “under bridge,” inward Ojota on mainland Lagos, killing one person while two others sustained injuries. Official account by LASEMA said the truck fell on its side and trapped the three persons in, after the driver lost control while driving at top speed. “Two adult males were rescued, while an adult female unfortunately lost her life,” the agency reported.
Trucks hauling unlatched containers have become such lethal menace on urban highways that ‘Operation Scorpion II’ recently launched by the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) to curb the trend is most welcome. Corps Marshal Boboye Oyeyemi said no fewer than 800 articulated vehicles were impounded within two weeks of the operation along the Lagos, Ogun and Oyo corridors, with 150 offenders prosecuted. Those statistics indicate the prevalence of the challenge. “We have tackled the safety risk associated with unlatched containerised cargoes being conveyed on flatbed trucks through ongoing special enforcement patrols,” Oyeyemi reassured at a strategy meeting with FRSC high command corps, zonal commanding officers and sector commanders in Abuja.
From diagnoses of past incidents, container accidents result mostly from the mechanical state of articulated trucks hauling them and traffic culture/mental fitness of the drivers. Capping that is the egregious factor of those containers not being latched to the flatbed trucks. It is a basic safety precaution that truck operators – owners and drivers – doubly ensure that containers being hauled by their vehicles are latched for the safety of all. That they aren’t doing this suggest poor sensitisation or outright illiteracy of public safety requirements, and the onus rests with the FRSC and other traffic agencies to hold them strictly to account. The conditions of those trucks also need be preemptively ascertained and the fitness of the drivers certified.
A far-reaching solution would be to decongest urban highways of truck cargoes when the rail system is sufficiently developed to provide alternative means of transportation. But an avoidance strategy in the interim is to make the idea of specifying time bands for container traffic outside peak periods of civil traffic work. Attempts at this have been made in the past and they failed, the challenge now is to make them succeed. Recurrent deaths from container mishaps are so gross and gratuitous that they simply can’t be tolerated.
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