Decision to leap from truck ‘led to death’
A coroner investigating the death of a truck driver found there is a ‘‘folklore’’ among ground-spreaders in New Zealand – if there is trouble with the truck ‘‘don’t go down with the ship’’.
That is, if you lose control of the truck, get out before it crashes.
It may have been this belief that led to the death of Chris Corlett, 34, when he left the cab of his truck while it careened out of control on a slope on Canterbury’s Banks Peninsula.
He left behind two young daughters and wife Jenny Corlett, who found out she was pregnant with a third child two weeks after her husband died. She and their children have since resettled in Tauranga.
Ground-spreading fertiliser on New Zealand farms kills, on average, one New Zealander a year.
Corlett was using a 2004 Mercedes Benz 1835 AK Actros to spread fertiliser on a farm near Purau in March 2015 when his truck hurtled backwards down a slope on the edge of a paddock.
Farm owner Brian Keenan, who was on top of a nearby hill at the time, said he saw the truck heading backwards down the hill, ‘‘bouncing heavily’’, then saw the cab door open while the truck was airborne.
Keenan rushed to the scene on his quad bike and found the truck still upright at the bottom of the gully with Corlett lying 20 to 30 metres away, unresponsive and without a pulse. Keenan called 111. The truck did not roll. Serious crash analyst Sergeant Nigel Price said he thought Corlett jumped from the truck while it careened downhill.
He thought Chris Corlett would have almost certainly survived the crash if he stayed in the cab with a seatbelt on.
Without a seatbelt, Price believed, Corlett would still have been more likely to survive.
‘‘If they jump from a vehicle that’s moving straight, the ground is normally a far worse enemy than the impact,’’ Price said.
‘‘[Corlett’s] decision to alight from the vehicle was pretty much the wrong one.
‘‘There is a common and highly incorrect and false belief that people can jump from a vehicle as it rolls . . . the reality is when people jump from a rolling vehicle they get thrown in front.’’
Corlett once told a co-worker he would ‘‘not go down with the ship’’.
The area Corlett was working in had been ground-spread before. The 17 degree slope the truck crashed down was not the steepest slope on the Fernglen property.
Co-workers said Corlett had worked on slopes of up to 40 degrees before.
Coroner Brigitte Windley found it was likely Corlett hit a rock, was in too high a gear at the time and unable to stop the truck from stalling.
He then lost control of the truck.
‘‘The balance of evidence . . . suggests [Corlett] was not wearing his seatbelt during the crash sequence and made a conscious decision to alight.
‘‘The expert evidence is that his survival prospects would have been significantly improved had he remained in the cab, and almost certain had he remained with his seatbelt on.’’
She found there was evidence ‘‘not going down with the ship’’ was an old belief in the ground-spreading industry.
Company owner Murray Righton said truck cabs used to be much weaker, hence the belief that getting out of the cab would increase the chance of survival.
Experienced co-worker Grant Wood described Corlett as having ‘‘a natural aptitude for driving’’ and said he was a ‘‘confident and competent driver’’.
The Coroner asked the New Zealand Ground-spread Fertilisers’ Association to work with WorkSafe to make sure ground-spreaders wore seatbelts and tried to eradicate the belief that, in a crash situation, it was safer to jump out than to stay in the truck.
‘‘Given the suggested correlation between this folklore and decreased survival prospects, properly informed driver education is a must.’’
The Coroner ruled Corlett died from torso crush injuries from alighting from the truck cab during its uncontrolled downhill descent following loss of power and traction.