By J.P. Antonacci | The Hamilton Spectator
Emma Richard awoke to the sound of her mother screaming.
She ran down the stairs to find a police officer comforting the distraught woman in the family’s living room.
Confused, Richard asked her mother what was wrong.
“And she said, ‘Daddy died,’” Richard told justice of the peace Audrey Greene Summers during an August 21 court hearing in Simcoe into the death of Richard’s father, Junior Romain Richard, a fleet truck operator with Waterford-based waste collection company Norfolk Disposal Services Ltd.
Richard, known to colleagues and friends as “JR,” died on the job in April 2022 when the garbage truck he was driving along a rural road near Port Dover inexplicably crossed the road and rolled into a ditch.
Richard, a 42-year-old father of three, was thrown from the truck and died at the scene.
Richard’s employer was charged under the Occupational Health and Safety Act with “failing to provide information, instruction and supervision” to ensure Richard could safely operate the vehicle.
Doug Gatward, operations manager for Norfolk Disposal, submitted a guilty plea on behalf of the company.
Fatal crash
On the ill-fated spring morning, Richard — who had been with the company two years — was filling in for an absent driver on a collection route he had driven before, according to an agreed statement of facts read out in court by lawyer Judy Chan of the provincial labour ministry.
He was driving the truck from the right-hand side, which requires operators to stand in the cab, allowing them to easily hop off the truck at a standstill.
According to investigators, Richard’s truck “veered onto the north shoulder” of Concession 2 Woodhouse before “abruptly” crossing the road and driving into the south ditch, Chan said. Richard was thrown from the truck out of the right-hand side door.
Why the truck rolled into the ditch remains a mystery, Chan said.
Gaps in training
A Ministry of Labour investigation following Richard’s death discovered gaps in training and supervision for drivers at Norfolk Disposal.
New hires were told the rules for operating the trucks and watched videos demonstrating defensive driving techniques, followed by in-class tests.
But workers were not required to read the truck’s operator’s manual and were “not consistently trained” about safe operation, court heard. To save time, drivers would often leave the right-hand door open while standing behind the wheel and not wear their seatbelt between stops.
And while the company put stickers in some trucks telling drivers not to exceed 32 km/h while driving from the right side, not all drivers respected the speed limit.
Norfolk Disposal was found to not keep records detailing employee training, making it impossible to know if Richard had been trained on how to safely drive the truck from a standing position.
The main training technique was sending a new hire out to “shadow” an experienced driver for a few weeks. But the trainers had no standard checklist to confirm the new drivers met all safety requirements, court heard.
The problem with that system, the judge said, is the more experienced drivers might themselves “have been deficiently trained,” possibly leaving “a large percentage of employees” without adequate safety training.
At the time of Richard’s death, the company did not have a system in place to supervise workers on their collection routes, an oversight that also contravenes provincial labour laws.
Changes made
In the wake of Richard’s death, Norfolk Disposal hired a supervisor to oversee curbside waste pickup, including hands-on observation of the drivers.
The company installed safety cameras that can alert drivers to hazards, and also tightened up its training protocols and documentation, including retraining all operators on the importance of seatbelt use, adhering to speed limits and keeping the truck doors closed when in motion.
Those “comprehensive” changes, plus the guilty plea, “can be seen as an expression of remorse” from the company, Summers said.
“That means to me there’s a full responsibility taken by this entity for what has happened,” she said.
The judge agreed with the Crown and defence’s joint submission of a $160,000 fine, an amount Chan said would hit the relatively small company — which has approximately 80 employees — “in the pocketbook” while serving as an industry-wide deterrent.
Adding in a mandatory 25 per cent surcharge for a fund to assist victims of crime, the total financial penalty to Norfolk Disposal is $200,000.
The dollar amount, Chan said, “is not intended to place a monetary value on Mr. Richard’s life, and indeed, no fine amount can ever purport to do so.”
Richard “suffered the worst possible harm,” Chan added.
“And no worker, and no worker’s family, should expect that the worker would leave for work in the morning and just never come home. It’s unimaginable.”
‘I miss everything’
In an obituary posted online, Richard’s family remembered the New Brunswick native as a baseball player, musician, “cherished friend” to many and “proud daddy” to his three children.
“I lost my partner, my soulmate, my best friend of 22 years,” Zabrina Richard said in her victim impact statement.
Widowed at 39, Richard told the court she felt “lost.”
“Every day there’s something that reminds me of JR. I still expect him to walk through the door and tell me about his day,” she said.
“I miss his smile. I miss his laugh. I miss everything.”
In a social media post shortly after the crash, Norfolk Disposal expressed its “deep sorrow” at Richard’s death and offered condolences to his family and friends.
“JR was an important part of the Norfolk Disposal Services Limited team and will be missed by many,” the post read.
In court, Richard’s daughter spoke of the pain of picturing her father dying alone on the side of the road “with nobody there to help.”
“I lost a piece of my heart that day that I will never get back,” Emma Richard said.
“I’m angry that this all could have been prevented.”
