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A Survey on Working under Trees with an Agricultural Narrow Tractor in Italy
Leonardo Vita, Davide Gattamelata, Daniele Puri and Vincenzo Laurendi
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DOI:10.17265/2161-6256/2021.02.004
Italian Workers’ Compensation Authority (Inail), Department of Innovation Technologies and Safety of Plants, Products and Anthropic Settlement, Rome 00143, Italy
To protect the driver in case of a tractor overturn, narrow-track tractors, mainly used for working under trees or in vineyards, can be equipped with a foldable roll-over protective structure (FROPS) generally consisting of a two-pillar front-mounted foldable rollbar. FROPSs have been mainly developed to offer greater mobility when working in low overhead clearance zones (CZs) and more storage options. However, many fatalities and serious injuries in Italy are due to overturn of narrow tractors with FROPS not in safety configuration. The reason lies on that lowering and raising a conventional FROPS is a time-consuming and strenuous process. After operators fold down FROPS to pass a low overhead CZ, some prefer to leave it in the folded or inoperative position, increasing the risk of a roll-over fatality. Italian Workers Compensation Authority (Inail) collects injury reports of workers covered by compulsory accident insurance. However, for agricultural sector Inail set up in 2008 a national observatory to add data and information on fatalities in agriculture covering workers, even those not Inail insured. From these data it appears that about 10 fatalities per year occur in Italy involving folded ROPS. The aim of the analysis in this article is to make a survey on the FROPS issue considering both what is required by Mother Regulation (Regulation (EU) 167/2013) for new tractors and the achievable technical solutions to be applied on old tractors for reducing the misuse of FROPS.
foldable roll-over protective structure (FROPS), compact ROPS (CROPS), finite element method (FEM), low profile tractor.
Vita, L., Gattamelata, D., Puri, D., and Laurendi, V. 2021. "A Survey on Working under Trees with an Agricultural Narrow Tractor in Italy." Journal of Agricultural Science and Technology A 11 (2021): 93-104.
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