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TODD DILLS
Truckers News Senior Editor
Todd Dills blogs daily from
Nashville, Tenn., via www.
overdriveonline.com/channel19.
Follow him at http://twitter.com/
channel19todd. To read Todd’s
blog on your smartphone, scan
this QR code
using a decoder,
which can be
found in your
phone’s app store.
Renewed vigilance
Keep situational awareness high
for stowaways along the border
D
esperate people sometimes
take desperate measures.
That maxim was never more evident than in mid-November when
owner-operator Henry Albert
was fueling his Freightliner at
a Pilot Flying J location in Laredo, Texas, and was approached
by one of his fellow haulers. The
driver urgently asked Albert questions in an attempt to determine
the whereabouts of a U.S. Xpress
driver parked in the fuel line adjacent to Albert.
Unbeknownst to the U.S.
Xpress driver, a young man and
woman were crouched on top
of his sleeper in the small cavity
behind the tractor’s high roof fairing (see Albert’s picture here) in
an attempt to stow away on the
U.S. interior-bound rig. A testament to the value of drivers looking out for each other, Albert
posted the story to his blog after
one of his regular runs from the
Charlotte, N.C., area, where he
lives, to the border zone and back.
I can’t imagine a more uncomfortable spot anywhere else on
a tractor but straddled atop the
trailer landing gear, as unrealistic
as that might be. (Though the circumstances are very different, the
whole episode does bring to mind
the hauler who, in an effort to
foil a theft of his tractor, running
bobtail, ended up on its deckplate during a dramatic hour-long
police-chase ride outside Atlanta I
wrote about in 2009.)
The truck’s driver, Albert said,
did the smart thing and decided
to let the authorities handle the
situation, calling police. “Also, he
contacted his company to make
them aware of what was happening,” Albert wrote in his blog post
about it. And as he and other drivers went about their business waiting for the cops to show up, “the
two individuals realized the truck
was sitting for too long and they
climbed out and ran away.” When
police came, they gathered details
of the incident from Albert and
other witnesses before beginning
their search.
If you’re hauling regularly to
the border zone, best to keep
extra-vigilant awareness about
you during stops, Albert says.
Miss something like this happening and you’d have quite a problem on your hands at the checkpoints at the end of the border
commercial zone.
Stopping to fuel in Laredo anytime soon?
Look up – there may be a stowaway in the
space behind your roof fairing, atop your
cab, as in this photo captured at the Flying
J there by owner-operator Henry Albert.
COURTESY JOYCE SMITH
POSTED
‘Real Steel’
rig auctioned
Joyce Smith, co-owner of
Ron Smith Trucking of Breckenridge, Mich., shuttered the
company about a year ago,
a month after her husband
passed away. At press time,
the small fleet’s equipment
was set to be auctioned Dec.
8. Among the 17 tractors on
offer (among livestock, flatbed and other trailers as well
as other equipment) was the
pictured 1994 Freightliner
cabover, which holds the
distinction of not only being
a fine-looking, long-running
piece of iron from a longlived livestock hauling operation — it was an extra in
the opening scene of “Real
Steel,” this summer’s blockbuster about a boxer (Hugh
Jackman) turned robot-fight
promoter.
To film the scene, says
Smith, they took “five of our
82 TRUCKERS NEWS JANUARY 2012
trailers and three of our tractors” to Detroit, where the
film was made. In the scene
in the finished film, she adds,
“the trucks are set up as an
arena around some wrestling robots.”
Separate,
not equal
That separation could be
diminishing when it comes
to U.S. and Mexican tucking, now that a new pilot
program for cross-border
long haul is under way. In
the wake of the Oct. 21
border ceremony at Laredo,
when the first Mexican
truck crossed as part of
the new cross-border pilot
program, J.E. Dyer wrote
at the Hot Air Green Room
website that the job-creation
rhetoric so prominent in
Washington these days has
been revealed for what it is.
Namely, that is, bunk that
has no basis in the way we
all think about jobs, as ultimately an active culmination
of individual skill, need and
desire. The politicians view
jobs as constituency-building
opportunities, as tools in an
arsenal of favor-influencing
widgets, Dyer says. And
just as expensive emissions
regulations keep coming
from California — and
D.C., with the announcements of new fuel-mileage
standards for heavy trucks
within the last year — the
cross-border trucking pilot
program, take two (“copilot
program,” anyone?), revives.
Dyer likens it to a sort of
piling on to the backs of the
independents. Regulations,
in general (and these in particular), Dyer notes, “tilt the
playing field on behalf of
favored constituencies …
Regulations inherently create artificial advantages and
disadvantages.”