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TRUCKER STORY * USA: HARD TRUCKING. One day on wheel
* New York - Independent truckers say new safety rules threaten their livelihood
7:00 a.m. The shipping warehouse in Madison, Mississippi
-- Robert Harsell, a 68-year-old independent truck driver, arrives right on time to pick up 8,000 pounds of cookies for Starbucks. They’re being sent to a warehouse in Henrietta, New York, 1,300 miles away. He has 51 hours to get there, and the clock is ticking... But the warehouse manager says the load isn’t ready. Harsell rubs his long, bushy beard and walks back to his 18-wheeler. The front unit, also called the “tractor,” is a square-nosed 1989 blue Freightliner that hasn’t been washed in years. It’s pulling an old Dorsey refrigerated trailer, or “reefer,” set to 65 degrees for the cookies... The truck is also his home for most of the year, and he shares it with a 16-year-old mixed-breed rescue dog named Blackie. He picked her up on Christmas Day 15 years ago in Tucson, Arizona. At night, she curls up next to him in a small sleeping bunk behind the seats, among scattered wrenches, cables, oil containers, empty sardine cans, unwashed clothes and the other detritus of his hard-trucking nomadic life...
9:15 a.m. No load, no estimate of when it will be ready
-- The warehouse workers are in no hurry. It doesn’t cost them a dime to keep a trucker waiting... Harsell is one of 350,000 independent owner-operators hauling freight around the country in his own big rig. The other 90 percent of U.S. truckers — 3 million of them — lease their vehicles and driving services to a company or drive company trucks... Like many independent truck drivers, Harsell feels like the deck is increasingly stacked against him. Unlike company drivers, independents have to pay for their own diesel, highway tolls, insurance, permits, repairs and maintenance, and these costs have been rising for decades, while the rates for transporting freight have remained relatively low. But nothing aggravates independent truckers more than the hours-of-service regulations imposed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA. “They’re squeezing us out of a living, and in the name of safety they’re making the highways more dangerous,” says Harsell, echoing a widely held view... The regulations allow truckers to be on duty for 14 consecutive hours, with a mandatory half-hour break. Within those 14 hours, they’re permitted to drive for a maximum of 11. The other three hours allow for loading, unloading and eating. When the 11- or 14-hour limit is reached, they have to stop driving for 10 hours, and spend at least 8 hours in the sleeping berth. There are also limits on hours spent driving per week... The federal hours-of-service regulations date back to 1938, apply to nearly all commercial vehicles and are intended to reduce accidents caused by driver fatigue. Highway-safety advocates attack them for being too lax and allowing truckers to drive when they’re dangerously exhausted. American Trucking Associations says the regulations are too restrictive and cause excessive burdens on productivity. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, or OOIDA, an organization with more than 150,000 members, including Harsell, strongly opposes the regulations... The regulations are pressuring truckers to make as many miles as possible in those 11 hours, says Harsell, especially the company drivers who get paid by the mile...10:05 a.m. Finally, the shippers are ready to load
-- Harsell slides back the tandem wheels on the trailer so it can better support the weight of the forklift and backs up to the loading dock. While the forklift driver stacks pallets of plastic-wrapped cookie boxes in his trailer, Harsell takes Blackie for a brief sniff-about in the cool spring sunshine.10:30 a.m. Pulling away from the loading dock
-- Three and a half hours of his day are gone, wasted, irretrievable... Truckers are required to show up-to-date logbooks to Department of Transportation inspectors and police officers who ask for them. It’s no secret that truckers sometimes falsify their logbooks to show compliance with the hours-of-service regulations. Harsell outlines a few likely scenarios. If the delivery point is half an hour away, it’s a rare driver who will pull over and rest for 10 hours because his legal time has run out. Similarly, if a driver runs out of hours a few miles from home, there’s a strong temptation to go the extra distance and fudge the timeline in the logbook. Some company truckers, who get paid by the mile, make fictional logbook entries to earn more money, he says... A driver might also falsify a logbook entry to disguise a breakdown, or a two-hour nap on the edge of a city during rush hour. The main reason why truckers falsify logs, however, is to get freight delivered on time...
-- OOIDA says it’s an unfair financial burden to make independent drivers responsible for paying for e-logs (also known as EODs or EOBRs) and paying the monthly fees to operate them, especially since there’s no proof that these devices reduce accidents. Says Spencer. “But they have the worst safety record of any commercial drivers on the roads. And independent owner-operators using paper logbooks have the best safety record.” It comes down to experience more than anything, says Spencer. According to Harsell, the big companies tend to hire young, poorly trained, badly paid drivers and pressure them to get as far as possible in their electronically monitored 11-hour stints. Most independents are older and more experienced, having worked and saved their way toward owning a truck. They tend to drive more carefully because an accident could put them out of business. But if e-logs become mandatory, many skilled and experienced drivers will quit the industry, says Spencer, and the market dominance of the big trucking companies will increase. “We’re already seeing it. A lot of our members just don’t like the idea of being electronically monitored by the government and told when to sleep.”
11:30 a.m. Breakfast
-- Harsell pulls off Interstate 20 for a late breakfast sandwich and coffee to go, then continues driving east toward Alabama... He started driving commercial trucks three decades ago, and since 2003 he’s been an independent owner-operator, a one-man trucking company hauling freight around the country...
3:30 p.m. Sun on the I-59, northeast Alabama
4:10 p.m. Break and refuel, I-24, southern Tennessee
-- The hours-of-service regulations require Harsell to take a half-hour break. “It’s more of a chore than anything,” he says. “I’m feeling good, but Blackie needs a bathroom break.” (Harsell, like most male truckers, pees into a plastic container while he’s driving). He stops at a gas station, puts $300 of diesel in his tanks, eats some canned sardines... Truck-driving is a notoriously unhealthy profession, but he’s in good shape for a man nearing 70 and he easily passed his recent bi-annual physical. He lives on canned fish, fresh fruit, whole milk and bacon-and-egg sandwiches, and he runs for short distances in truck stop and supermarket parking lots. On a time-crunch load like this one, he forgoes his running, and takes his sandwiches to go... He never wastes money on a motel room. Very few truckers do. But even at home in Virginia, he sleeps in the bunk of his truck every night, on an unpadded sheet of plywood. “It’s good for the back,” he says...
4:40 p.m. Approaching Chattanooga
-- Motorists pass him all day long without a second glance at the grubby old truck in the slow lane. How many Starbucks customers, Harsell wonders, ever think about trucks and the drivers who deliver the coffee beans and baked goods? If trucks stopped running for a day, according to the American Trucking Associations, there would be severe fuel shortages in the nation’s gas stations. If they stopped running for three days, hospital patients would die for lack of medical supplies, and supermarkets would start running out of food. As the saying goes, “If you bought it, a truck brought it”... The industry is moving toward corporate dominance, and the independents are getting left behind, says Harsell... If he could make one change to the hours-of-service regulations, Harsell would bring back the pre-2003 “split-sleeper berth provision.” It allowed drivers to split their rest time into two periods, so it was easier to pull over when you felt sleepy, and drive further later when you were rested. “It allowed me to use my best judgment, and drive safely without breaking the law,” he says...
5:07 p.m. Near collision, I-24, Exit 178
-- Harsell has driven more than a million miles without an accident, but there have been some close calls over the years, and there’s a bad moment this afternoon on the edge of Chattanooga. A motorist suddenly slices in front of him to make an exit, giving him no chance to slow down his 65-foot, 40,000-pound truck. “That was close,” Harsell says afterwards. “I really wish they wouldn’t do that” ... The United States currently averages about 30,000 traffic fatalities a year. Of those, nearly 4,000 are killed in “truck-related accidents.” This number is often cited by safety groups such as Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT), whose founders have lost family members in fatigue-related truck accidents, as a reason for more restrictive hours-of-service regulations, and mandatory e-logs. But the majority of those fatal accidents were not caused by truck drivers, records show, fatigued or otherwise. Instead, in more than 80 percent of fatal crashes involving passenger vehicles and large trucks, it was the car driver who was at fault, according to three recent years of FMCSA records... Of the roughly 700 traffic fatalities a year that are caused by truck drivers, brake failure is the most commonly cited reason. It’s difficult to measure the influence of fatigue, a subjective condition that is often under-reported by truckers. The Department of Transportation estimates that fatigue accounts for 13 percent of fatal accidents caused by truckers. The American Trucking Associations says 7 percent (PDF)... But the specter of truckers falling asleep at the wheel has dominated the controversy around safety regulations, partly because the results can be so devastating...
7.20 p.m. 'Brake check' on I-75
-- This is trucker slang for a traffic jam, or a hold-up. The interstate outside Knoxville is a string of red brake lights as far as the eye can see. Harsell wonders if it’s construction or an accident. It takes him 55 minutes to find out. A wrecking truck is hauling a dented car from the median, and drivers are crawling past to take a good look. Another hour wasted...
Midnight Bull’s Gap, Tennessee
-- Harsell is off-duty, Blackie is asleep. The cardinal rule of truck-driving, he says, is to pull over when you start getting sleepy. But it’s often difficult to find somewhere legal where you can park an eighteen-wheeler and crawl into the bunk for the night. The interstate rest areas and truck stops are nearly always full, crime can be a problem and inexperienced drivers often clip parked trucks when they’re turning. Instead he looks for Walmart and Home Depot parking lots, empty lots by rivers and railroad tracks, certain supermarkets and truck-friendly cafés. Another good option is older, out-of-the-way truck stops a mile or two off the interstate, like the one he’s parked at tonight in eastern Tennessee...Day 2 Bull’s Gap, Tennessee, to Mansfield, Pennsylvania
10:50 a.m. Delivery, Henrietta, New York
-- He arrives 10 minutes early. The warehouse isn’t ready to take delivery, but he doesn’t mind this in the slightest. He takes Blackie for a short walk, and enjoys the feeling of bipedal locomotion in fresh air. He fiddles with a minor battery problem... Then he calls his freight broker, asking for a load originating in upstate New York, going anywhere at all. The broker has nothing. Neither does truckstop.com. “I’m a man without a future,” says Harsell cheerfully. “I’ll rest up here until I get a load. Or maybe I’ll go home and let Blackie run in the mountains” ... He says he’ll keep on trucking until e-logs become mandatory. He still owes money to the banks, so he needs to keep earning. And there’s another reason why it’s hard to quit. “Bumping that loading dock, getting the bill of lading, heading out on the road agan... I’m a trucker, man. It’s in my blood” ...
(Photos by William Widmer for Al Jazeera America) -- New York City, NY, USA - Al Jazeera America, by Richard Grantby Alex Newman, Mark Rykoff, and Jayati Vora - June 14, 2015
PUBLISHER NOTE: Really a very good summary of the work, life, dreams, and up to date concerns, of an independent American Trucker !!! WE NEED ALL THESE LIBERTARIAN MEN STILL EXIST... TAKE CARE OF !!!
Labels: truckers' stories
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