A postal truck , without a driver, jumped our driveway’s retaining wall, and crashed into our front-yard trees. As the photo below shows, a postal truck miraculously squeezed between two trees and hit a third tree in our front yard. This accident could have been a lot worse; fortunately no one was injured.
My wife heard the truck crash into our trees from inside our house. Fortunately the accident did not occur a couple minutes later because the truck could have hit my wife’s car as she was backing out of the driveway.
What apparently happened was that the postal carrier tried to start the truck on the hill above our house; however, the truck bucked. The postal carrier then fell out of the vehicle. The truck started rolling down the hill by itself, jumped our retaining wall, and hit our trees.
We understand that the postal carrier was having problems earlier with the vehicle bucking, when turning the ignition. A vehicle-buck on a hill above our house proved to be the stimulus for the accident.
Postal Truck Accident Long-term Avoidance
The postal carrier driver obvious made poor judgments and unfortunately will need to deal with the consequences; however, this event should not be considered a special cause event and dismissed. Organizations benefit when they track the frequency of accidents and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) using a 30,000-foot-level metric approach. With this approach to performance tracking, organizations can make prediction statements relative to the expected frequency of future occurrences. When a prediction statement is not desirable, this metric improvement need would pull for the creation of one or process improvement projects. When true improvements have been made to operational processes, the impact to the performance metric report-out would be shown and displayed from a process point of view using 30,000-foot-level reporting.
Postal Truck Accident Improvement Opportunities
Some questions come to my mind (as an outsider) relative to processes improvements of the Post Office’s vehicle usage and internal processes. These items could be the starting point for discussion between a team of postal carriers, process owners, and management on what might be done differently to reduce the likelihood of future accidents.
- What poka yoke (mistake proofing) is being done relative to ensuring that seat belts are adequately connected before starting the vehicle? Alarm or fail safe operational switch? Simply making a policy statement that everyone is to ″buckle up″ is not adequate to prevent some accidents from occurring, not unlike this accident.
- How many postal drivers fail to buckle up between deliveries? If there are many, or even a few, it seems like one should look into an alternative seat belt design that may have less mechanical mechanisms for wear out because of frequent connections and disconnections. Also, a design should be considered where the seat belts can be quickly connected and disconnect.
- The postal carrier said that they were having problems with the vehicle bucking before the incident. Are there adequate preventive maintenance execution for the trucks and/or a system for addressing complaints by the drivers? If a postal carrier identifies an issue, will the problem be resolved soon so that the driver is not later at risk with the vehicle?
Maybe the Post Office has already addressed the above issues; however, something from a process point of view did break down to cause this accident.
Postal Truck Accident: Fixing our Yard
One would think that the Post Office would have contacted us promptly about fixing our yard. It has been a week since the accident occurred but we have not heard anything from the Post Office. Another Post Office process apparently needs to be addressed.
Hopefully there has been no permanent damage to our trees. We decided that we should contact an arborist to see if something needs to be done to the scraping of our trees, since the Post Office apparently does not seem to care.
Although this was a very unique situation, this event was not a special cause condition, as noted above. I am sure many other accidents have happened with postal trucks. What are your thoughts for the United States Postal Services relative to improving their processes, accident rate metrics and other protocol? Is there something more we can do to get their response?