Important safety equipment required by law wasn’t present in a garbage truck that knocked over a beam at Coquitlam Centre last August, crushing the driver, according to a WorkSafe BC report obtained by CTV News.

There was no warning system present in the Smithrite truck to let the driver know his equipment was raised up – which would have warned the driver before the equipment smashed into the beam, the report says.

“The garbage truck involved in the incident had not been retrofitted with either an audio or visual warning device as required,” the report says. “Several other trucks had not been included in Smithrite’s retro-fit of the fleet to install these alarms.”

Requirements for those warning systems were put in place after a similar deadly accident in Coquitlam in 2005, where trucker Ralston Vassell was killed when his garbage truck’s raised equipment knocked into an overpass, crushing him.

Vassell’s son Josh, who was 12 at the time of the deadly accident, told CTV News that he couldn’t believe that nine years after the crash all trucks haven’t been upgraded.

“I am pretty upset about the fact that law wasn’t implemented,” Vassell said. “Companies that are out there should have equipment like that.”

No one else should face the risk of a preventable crash, Vassell said.

“It still brings me back now to think I wish my father was here for certain things in my life but you can’t bring back people,” he said.

The report says the driver arrived at the mall at 8:30 am August 2, 2013 to pick up a compactor in an area accessed under a decorative brick-covered beam. The driver attached a hook to the compactor and was raising it with a winch while moving forward in neutral.

That’s when the upper part of the compactor struck the beam, which detached from its supports and crushed the cab. He called for help on the truck radio. A fire burst out in the cab, which was put out by passersby, and firefighters and paramedics pulled him from the cab. He survived with major injuries.

Smithrite was a new customer of the mall, and representatives preformed a site check of the area including the beam on May 31, 2013, the report says. At that point they noticed that the beam had been previously struck and had “a long conversation among themselves” before determining that the site was safe.

But the company didn’t pass on its concerns to its drivers, the report says.

“Smithrite did not communicate with its drivers about the specific issue of the archway at the incident location,” the report says. The injured driver had never served the incident location with the archway on the day before the incident.

The report also points out that the beam was in the way of the work and should have been marked as a hazard.

“The ornamental archway served no useful function, and a similar archway at another location had been removed years before,” the report says.

Morguard Investments Limited, which runs the mall, didn’t respond to interview requests and instead provided a statement that it had posted the report. The company didn’t respond to questions about what the beam was for or why a previous beam had been removed.

The report also blamed driver error, alleging he was unsafe while moving the truck at the same time as bringing the bin up with a winch. The driver told investigators he was simultaneously engaging the controls, and may not have noticed an extra warning that his equipment was raised.

“Performing several tasks at the same time may explain, in part, why the driver was not aware of the proximity of the archway at this critical moment,” the report says.

The report says that inadequate training and instruction was not an underlying factor in the accident.