Heavy trucks, deadly toll

Saturday, July 2, 2005 | 12:01 p.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 2-3, 2005

Nineteen-year-old Ashley Swain was driving home after work in the wee hours of Dec. 26. She was to exchange Christmas presents with her father later that day.

Stopped at the red light on the Cheyenne off-ramp of Interstate 15, she was less than two miles from her home when a Republic Services garbage truck came barreling up behind her.

The truck's driver, Richard Charles Hall, lost control on the curving off-ramp, and the truck overturned onto Swain's Chevrolet Suburban.

The truck was more than 18,000 pounds overweight, and Hall was going more than 60 mph on the uphill ramp where the recommended speed was 40 mph, Nevada Highway Patrol troopers said.

Swain was crushed and died instantly, troopers said.

Hall is facing felony charges of involuntary manslaughter and reckless driving.

A fate such as Swain's is arguably every motorist's worst nightmare, but experts say valley residents are lucky that traffic deaths involving overweight trucks don't occur more often.

Even trucks within legal weight limits are heavy enough to crush any passenger vehicle, experts said. But when truck drivers ignore the weight limits, they place greater stress on their trucks and on the roadways, increasing the chances for fatal collisions.

The most recent statistics available indicate Southern Nevada is more overloaded with dangerous and destructive overweight trucks most of the nation. Making matters even more troubling is the fact that the majority of overweight trucks were caught on roads other than highways, meaning they are doing more damage to roads that are not designed to handle such weights. So they are increasing the need for expensive repairs in addition to raising safety concerns.

Of the 936 trucks the Nevada Highway Patrol Commercial Division has weighed from January through May of this year, 175, or 19 percent, were overweight, according to data provided by Sgt. Wayne Wick. Most of those trucks -- 149, or 85 percent -- were on secondary streets.

Authorities and truckers alike say the situation in Southern Nevada is probably even worse than the latest numbers indicate because those numbers reflect only the relatively few trucks that troopers were able to weigh, authorities said.

That means there are a lot of dangerous trucks on the road.

"A truck that is overloaded is seven times more likely to have a safety defect as a truck that is not overloaded," said Brian Taylor, vice president of technical systems and business development at International Road Dynamics Inc., a company that sells truck scales.

"It's the nature of the industry," Taylor said. "If a trucker is willing to break one law he is generally willing to break several."

But a shortage of troopers and scales makes it difficult to track the tens of thousands of commercial trucks driving across Nevada's borders or on city streets.

The Southern Nevada division of the Nevada Highway Patrol has only 10 commercially trained troopers and four civilian inspectors, Wick said, with one other trooper on medical leave and two in training.

Having troopers to do the work is one thing; having the necessary equipment is another matter.

The highway patrol's Southern Nevada division currently owns five sets of portable scales for use in roving inspections and one semiportable scale it alternates between the Sloan and Apex inspection sites, which are usually open about once a week and almost always on Wednesdays.

Truck driver Stan Butler, 57, from Hyrum, Utah, comes through the Las Vegas Valley about 60 or 70 times a year. He said he rarely has been weighed by authorities.

"Probably in 15 years I've seen that open three times," Butler said of the weigh station on the outskirts of town. "I've gone months and never seen (it) open."

He figures Nevada is not very concerned about interstate trucks being overweight because many that pass through the state originated elsewhere.

"I don't think Nevada has any concern because they're relying on Utah, California, and Arizona (weigh stations) to pick them up," Butler said of overweight trucks.

He said it is usually trucks traveling shorter distances, such as those carrying containers from ports, that load quickly and exceed limits.

As he ate dinner at the Las Vegas Travel Center truck stop on Blue Diamond Road on Wednesday, 33-year-old Canada-based trucker Eric Wilson said the trucks most likely to be overweight are those going short distances and carrying heavy goods, such as construction materials.

With its booming population growth fueling one of the most active construction markets in the country, the Las Vegas Valley has more than its fair share of trucks hauling construction materials.

Whether it is construction industry trucks or other types of trucks, if they are overweight and rolling along Southern Nevada's roads, authorities say they want to catch more of them.

The 2005 Nevada Legislature recently approved $545,000 for more scales, enough to buy 128 new portable scales and enough to equip every commercial trooper in the state with his own set, Nevada Highway Patrol Lt. Bill Bainter said. Commercial troopers are those who have been been specially trained to inspect commercial vehicles. Each of the state's three regions will also get a new semiportable scale.

Right now troopers without scales often have to escort a truck to the nearest commercial truck stop if the trooper suspects the truck is overweight, as was the case for the last two months of 2004 when all of the Southern Nevada troopers' scales were being recertified. Those truck stops provide scales for their customers to check cargo weights.

Commercial troopers are often called away from truck enforcement duties for regular traffic patrol during bad weather or to provide escorts for trucks hauling low-level nuclear waste to the Nevada Test Site, Wick said.

State and federal mandates put the responsibility for enforcing weight and size regulations solely on troopers, Nevada Highway Patrol Sgt. Ken Roll said, but local police can also write tickets as long as they use certified scales.

For the most part, however, local police leave commercial vehicle enforcement to troopers because of the training that is a prerequisite for full inspections, authorities said. Because vehicle maintenance issues are often a bigger problem than trucks being overweight, the general thinking among law enforcement officials is that it isn't worth pulling over a vehicle to check weight alone.

None of the local police departments own scales and most traffic officers aren't trained in commercial enforcement, spokesmen for local departments said, although Henderson is in the process of training all of its traffic division officers.

Commercial troopers go through more than 80 hours of additional training to become qualified to inspect trucks, Wick said. A complete 37-step inspection can take up to two hours, and troopers must consult three manuals in checking the truck, its driver and the load it's carrying, including reviewing any hazardous materials.

Enforcement of weight and size regulations is a critical aspect of commercial vehicle inspections because overweight trucks pose a safety hazard to other drivers and do severe damage to federal and state highways, transportation experts said.

Roving inspections are key to catching violators who make sure to avoid the Sloan and Apex sites, Wick said.

Butler and other truck drivers said there is sometimes radio talk about scales and known ways to avoid them.

"Yeah, there are ways around them. But sometimes the cure is worse than the problem. They may go 100 miles out of the way to avoid a scale," Butler said.

Another issue for law enforcement is that it's often difficult to find safe places to pull the big rigs over. The trooper has to be able to walk around the truck, and the driver has to be able to pull back into traffic.

That makes it difficult to catch trucks on secondary streets where authorities believe many of the violators are, Wick said.

"Interstate haulers -- G.B. Hunt, Albertson's, Von's, Wal-Mart -- are rarely if ever overweight," Wick said. "Where we find most of them are on the city streets with the rock haulers and the more local trucks."

Many truck drivers said that exceeding weight limits is only to the driver's benefit if the pay is by weight, which they said was an increasingly rare practice.

Drivers said pay is usually based on mileage and that overweight trucks can negatively affect fuel economy, another driver concern.

Taylor, says improved commercial enforcement on the nation's highways has pushed the less scrupulous drivers onto secondary streets.

By driving overweight, those drivers pose a safety hazard to other drivers and are damaging the roadways without paying their fair share of taxes to cover the cost of road repairs, Taylor said.

To simplify Taylor's physics, if a single truck axle is 10 percent overweight, that axle is doing about 40 percent more damage to the road than an axle carrying its maximum weight.

"If every truck did that, the road would last 25 percent as long as it was predicted to last," Taylor said. "Roads are like rubber bands. If you keep snapping and snapping them, they break."

Large trucks can receive permits to haul extra weight if they pay for the additional damage to the roadway and if the weight doesn't go over the manufacturer's limits.

And to be fair, Taylor said, there also are ways that overweight trucks benefit the public. Trucks break the rules to cut down on the number of trips they have to make. That, in turn, lessens congestion on the road and the cost of shipping, the benefits of which can be passed on to the consumer.

The American Trucking Association backs increasing the maximum weight trucks are allowed to carry for those reasons, according to Darrin Roth, director of highway operations for the association.

The association supports the axle weight limitations established by both federal and state laws but believes the total maximum weight of 80,000 pounds is too low, Roth said.

"We are facing a difficult situation in the future where the amount of freight for the trucking industry will double in the next 25 years, according to the Federal Highway Administration's predictions," Roth said.

"We already have significant congestion in the highway system. If we haul that additional freight on same-size vehicles, there are going to be a lot more trucks and a lot more hazards," Roth said, noting that larger trucks also help the industry deal with a shortage of drivers.

The trucking association supports effective law enforcement on the current size and weight regulations to give everyone an "equal playing field," Roth said.

The association also supports roving inspections and particularly likes weigh-in-motion devices that Taylor's company makes. That type of scale -- which is set in the roadway and calculates weights as vehicles drive over it -- allows law enforcement to catch offenders without hindering the whole industry because the trucks don't have to stop to be weighed on those scales.

The state Transportation Department owns just one of the devices, a low-level one that can weigh trucks going 15 mph or less that it uses to predict road life and occasionally loans to the highway patrol to screen trucks, Wick said. Higher-speed -- and considerably more expensive -- devices can weigh trucks going up to 75 mph, allowing the highway patrol to green light trucks that are OK and stop trucks that are a problem.

The Nevada Highway Patrol is looking at buying some weigh-in-motion devices, but for now troopers say they are just happy that the Nevada Legislature approved the more than $500,000 worth of additional standard scales, and they are anxious to see how many additional overweight trucks they can take off the road.

The hope is they can prevent another death such as Ashley Swain's.

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