Tiaro truckie Joshua Mark Bullock has filed an $850,000 negligence lawsuit for a rollover that he claims caused him to suffer post traumatic stress disorder resulting in the loss of his $1406 per week job.
The Daily Mercury reports that according to documents filed in Mackay Supreme Court the 40-year-old claimed he lost his job soon after the crash between mine sites.
Bullock alleges he suffers from “intrusive thoughts and dreams” of the crash, regular panic attacks, suicidal ideation and that his psychiatric prognosis is poor.
He said that he’s “now precluded from work as a truck driver as a direct result of the PTSD”.
His former employer, however, Dirt Diesel and Dust Pty Ltd, trading as Queensland Bulk Haulage, has fired back, alleging that Bullock’s employment was terminated because he refused to take a drug test and that he had been driving too fast which was the cause of the crash.
Bullock had been driving between Ernest Henry and Mount Colin mines when the incident occurred on September 12, 2019 – “as the truck approached a crest on a sharp corner of an unsealed road, namely Mount Colin Access Rd, its brakes failed”.
“The truck started to pick up speed and partially drove up a rock wall to the side of the road way before rolling,” court documents alleged.
Bullock alleges that the brake line of the truck failed due to it being struck by an object, such as a rock, and disconnecting the brake lines push and twist air fittings as a result.
In court documents sighted by the Daily Mercury, the 40-year-old claimed he completed a pre-start check of “the truck that revealed no problems/issues”.
“Given the brakes of the truck have been in working order up until very shortly before the incident, the object must had struck the brake line as the truck travelled along Mount Colin Access Rd,” court documents read.
Bullock claimed the brake line would not have failed if an object struck it had it been fitted with fail safe fittings.
Queensland Bulk Haulage, in its defence, denied the brakes failed before the truck rolled or that an object struck the brake line “because there is an absence of any evidence” to support this claim.
“The material contributor to the incident was (Mr Bullock’s) failure to drive the truck at the speed he knew to have been required to control the operation of the truck through the section of road where the incident occurred,” Queensland Bulk Haulage’s defence claim stated.