Birds Eye view of traffic safety

London -- Frozen foods company Birds Eye has installed a new system to protect warehouse operatives at its Hull factory from the dangers of unscheduled trailer departure. A previous system of traffic lights and manual powering up of loading bays had failed to physically prevent drivers from leaving a bay prematurely.

Birds Eye opted for the Salvo system from Castell Safety International Ltd as a safer alternative. With Salvo, drivers reverse their trailer up to the loading bay and must then collect a Salvo Susie lock from a storage cabinet next to the bay door and fit it to the emergency airline coupling.

The action releases the uniquely-coded key from the end of the unit, which drivers then insert into an electrical switch located next to the cabinet. By turning the key drivers power up the bay, change the external traffic lights to red and send the internal lights to green. Loaders now know that it is safe to begin loading or unloading and depress the button on the internal switch to raise the bay door.

“We identified Salvo as a fail-safe system which was effectively one step up from our existing one”, comments Mick Cahill, Birds Eye’s safety and environmental manager, “and the transfer to the new system has gone as smooth as silk.”

Once Salvo had been installed on all ten bays, warehouse staff found that operating procedures remained unchanged. “Salvo’s not made a jot of difference to them”, continued Cahill, “except that it’s much safer and now provides a physical block to drive-aways. A lot of the drivers had already seen it at other sites, so they took to it quite happily.”