Police have raided the headquarters of Wollongong-based Barnetts Couriers in the wake of a fatal crash involving one of the company’s trucks.
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A large number of joint traffic taskforce police and RTA officials swooped on Barnetts’ Fairy Meadow depot on Montague Street early Friday for surprise vehicle inspections and an audit of the company’s systems and processes.
Trucks were inspected one-by-one while drivers stood idle.
One driver told the Mercury about 20 trucks had been held up by the inspections.
“I was supposed to leave an hour-and-a-half ago,” he said.
Inspectors detected at least one bald tyre and a frayed seatbelt. Police are expected to share the results of the searches later Friday.
The raid comes four days after a truck connected to Barnetts Couriers was involved in a crash that killed a 67-year-old Bega woman in Barden Ridge.
Business founder owner Bob Barnett was on site Friday morning despite his obvious poor health.
From his motorised scooter he told reporters the truck involved in Monday’s crash was the driver’s own.
He said it hadn’t been determined whether a defect had caused the accident.
“No one knows [the cause],” he said.
“I don’t know whether it was mechanical defects on the vehicle or not, but in the meantime [authorities] are down here.
“It’s the government wasting some money, that’s all. Have you seen how many men they’ve got here?”
He said truck driver fatigue could not have been a factor in Monday’s crash.
“This is how stupid they [the authorities] are, they’re looking at fatigue on Monday morning at three o’clock when he’s just started. [The driver] hasn’t worked for two days.”
Rob Pirc, secretary of TWU’s South Coast and Southern branch said while they don’t know the cause of the accident, it is not the first incident involving Barnetts.
“The company has an appalling record in regards to safety,” Mr Pirc said.
“There have been years of complaints that have come through from various drivers in relation to not only safety on trucks, but safety within the yard.”
Monday’s accident was the second fatality involving a Barnetts truck in the past four years.
In 2012 truck driver Kaine Daniel Barnett, Bob Barnett’s grandson, killed university student Sarah Frazer and tow-truck driver Geoff Clarke in a crash on the Hume Highway.
He failed to see the pair pulled over in the breakdown lane and must have been distracted for about eight seconds, a court found.
