More overweight trucks cited by Highway Patrol

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

Two of every five tractor-trailers stopped on city and county streets this year by the Nevada Highway Patrol have been cited as being overweight, the agency's commercial enforcement division says.

That is up from one in three in 2005, the Highway Patrol says. Overweight violations on roads and streets have been three times greater than those on highways the last two years even though five times more trucks were weighed on the highways than on secondary streets during that period.

By year's end, the Highway Patrol will have stopped and cited nearly twice as many trucks for being overweight than in 2005, in part because of additional scales purchased for the agency with an additional $545,000 allocated by the 2005 Legislature.

Last year, the Highway Patrol's Southern Nevada division owned five sets of portable scales for use in roving inspections and one semiportable scale. Today, the agency has 12 sets of portable scales and two semiportable sets, Sgt. J.A. Smith of the Highway Patrol's commercial enforcement division said.

Through October, 1,052 tractor-trailers have been stopped by the Highway Patrol on secondary streets and 419 of them - 39.8 percent - were cited for being overweight. For all of last year, 267 of 801 trucks stopped on local streets - 33.3 percent - were cited as overweight, Smith said.

On both streets and highways this year, the Highway Patrol's Southern Nevada office has stopped 7,626 tractor-trailers and found 7.7 percent overweight, Smith said. That is up from 7 percent of the 4,464 trucks pulled over in 2005.

Fines issued through October of this year to overloaded trucks total $757,257 or $1,294 per violation compared with $399,419 or $1,276 per violation last year.

In 2004 about 8 percent of the nearly 5,000 commercial vehicles weighed by troopers in the Las Vegas Valley were overweight, resulting in more than $428,000 in fines.

Such statistics are disturbing but not surprising to trucking safety reform advocates such as Angela Ipock, whose 19-year-old daughter, Ashley Swain, was killed the day after Christmas in 2004 when an overweight Republic Services garbage truck tipped over onto her vehicle in North Las Vegas.

"People call all the time about unsafe trucks, and we (she and ex-husband Thomas Swain) have spent two years taking photos of them and gathering information," Ipock said. "There has to be a better system established for checking truck safety."

In the wake of Swain's death, Republic Services says it has beefed up its procedures for keeping garbage trucks within the legal limits of 9- to 10-ton payloads.

"We have taken a proactive approach to ensure the safety of the general public and our employees," Republic Area President Bob Coyle said.

Changes, he said, include stressing to drivers at weekly safety meetings that they can refuse any load they feel is unsafe.

Coyle said Republic has asked its larger customers, including Strip resorts, to prevent water from getting into Republic's compactor units during the cleaning of trash bins. Excess water shifting in the garbage container is believed to have been a factor in making the truck that killed Swain overweight and unbalanced.

Also, Coyle said, truck loads emptied at transfer stations are weighed to determine if some customers on that particular route need additional pickups during the week to avoid overloading Republic's trucks.