Trucking safety in the spotlight

MINNEAPOLIS — The tractor-trailer rumbled south down Houston County Road 9, a two-lane highway that rolls across the fertile farmland of southeast Minnesota, on an overcast Saturday morning in March. The roads were clear of ice and snow, and the truck’s trailer was loaded with giant bales of hay.

Dale and Teresa Erickson, married for 26 years, were cruising north in their pickup.

Both vehicles were headed for a curve.

When the big rig driver felt the hay shift, he slammed on the brakes. But it was too late. Ten bales, each weighing an estimated 1,200 pounds, flew off. One crushed the pickup’s cab. Passers-by dragged Teresa out, but the pickup caught fire with Dale pinned inside. Both died within days.

The truck’s owner and driver, Randall Hongerholt, faces four misdemeanor charges, including failing to secure the load — the kind of violation that would have been caught during a roadside safety inspection. But federal records show that Hongerholt, who put on about 5,000 miles a year transporting grain, feed and hay, hadn’t undergone such a check from a certified inspector since October 2000, after a crash in which someone was injured.

Millions of large trucks crisscross state and federal highways every day, hauling billions of tons of goods from factories, fields and warehouses. Federal and state regulations govern truckers’ driving hours, equipment maintenance and load sizes, but enforcement of those rules through surprise roadside inspections has been falling nationally.

Even the weigh stations that dot the highway system are equipped to inspect just a small fraction of the trucks that pass through. Last year, for example, 433,078 vehicles went through a Minnesota weigh station on Interstate 94 while it was open. About 3,800 were inspected.

Taken out of service

The trucking industry argues that inspections take time and cut into productivity, especially for carriers that invest heavily in training and safety. Inspections should target carriers with a history of problems, they argue. Over the long haul, they say, the rate of fatal truck crashes has declined (despite a recent increase), and most collisions involving trucks are caused by the driver of a car or other passenger vehicle.

But of the trucks inspected on Minnesota’s highways last year, 24 percent of vehicles and 7 percent of drivers should not have been on the road, with safety violations so dangerous that they were temporarily declared out of service. Nationally, about 21 percent of inspected trucks were placed out of service.

“Think of that: One in every five trucks … shouldn’t be on the road,” said Kansas City attorney Jeff Burns, who specializes in truck crash litigation. “What would you do if the FAA said … 20 percent of these suckers shouldn’t have been flying?”

The steady stream of giant trucks lumbering through the St. Croix weigh station on Interstate 94 near the Wisconsin border is daunting. It’s the state’s busiest scale. Finding the dangerous trucks can be difficult.

Commercial vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds slowly roll onto a scale one after another without stopping. Inside the scale house, inspectors study the weights as they flash on a computer screen.

The vast majority of vehicles are signaled to pass back onto the freeway. Those with questionable weights — and some randomly selected by computer — are signaled to roll in front of the station’s two large windows, one on each side of the scale house. There, they are weighed again and inspectors conduct a quick visual check including lights, tires, straps holding down loads and the presence of a sticker signaling it passed the annual inspection required of most trucks.

It was an exercise in concentration, with inspectors looking over truck after truck, bouncing attention between the screen and the window, trying to find something amiss.

“Law enforcement is doing the best they can with what they’ve got,” said Matthew Meyerhoff, a driver turned trucking safety consultant who works with companies and testifies as an expert witness in court cases. Inspectors simply don’t have the time to do more, he said. “It’s minuscule, what’s really being inspected compared to the number of trucks.”

Each state has its own roadside inspection program, partly funded through the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which is charged with reducing crashes involving large trucks and buses.

Targeted approach

Carriers with a history of violations are the ones inspectors should be targeting, safety advocates and trucking associations say.

Giant trucking companies, which typically have more money to invest in equipment and safety, are overinspected because they have so many trucks running everywhere, said Brenda Lantz, associate director of the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute at North Dakota State University. Companies with just a few trucks and drivers who own their rigs are more likely to cut safety corners to keep costs down, experts said.

“I don’t know if we could ever have enough enforcement officers,” Lantz said. “You’ll never get enough funding.”

Many states already use software allowing carriers with good safety records to bypass weigh stations altogether.

In Minnesota, truckers paying $15.75 a month can subscribe to Drivewyze, an Internet-based service that uses a smartphone or other Web device to check safety records and sometimes allows them to bypass a couple of Minnesota weigh stations if their records are satisfactory. Most states use such programs giving historically safe carriers the possibility — but not a guarantee — of forgoing a time-consuming stop.

“It helps the traffic flow … helps us not to focus on the good carriers,” Nielson said.

Also, trucks that pass a full inspection with no critical violations get a decal good for up to three months, signaling that they don’t need to be inspected unless there is a apparent reason.

Conversely, carriers with too many poor inspections can be subject to more thorough investigations with federal or state compliance reviews at their place of business.

Despite those requirements, nationally about 21 percent of vehicles stopped for a roadside inspection are immediately pulled out of service with about 5 percent of drivers. Some industry officials argue that since inspectors are looking for problem vehicles, those figures are inflated. But they are similar to rates found in a study last year of random truck inspections: 22 percent of vehicles and 5 percent of drivers were pulled from the road.

While the violations are concerning, they aren’t typically causing crashes, said American Trucking Associations engineering director Ted Scott.

“I would rather see people enforcing the speed limits on trucks than worrying about whether it’s got all its lights running or working and all its mirrors attached,” Scott said. “That can be handled. … Focus on traffic law enforcement and those things that actually cause crashes.”

Scott Grenerth, director of regulatory affairs for the trade group that represents small carriers and individuals, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said owner-operators have better safety performance than large companies because they have more at stake.

Studies vary on who is typically at fault when trucks and other vehicles collide. Trucking industry leaders point to studies showing that passenger vehicles are overwhelmingly responsible for crashes. But in a national Large Truck Crash Causation study, looking at fatal and injury crashes in the early 2000s, trucks were assigned the “critical reason” — why something happened to make a crash inevitable — in 44 percent of such collisions. And in those crashes, 87 percent were attributed to driver error and 10 percent to a vehicle defect.

Laws of physics

Brakes are among the most common commercial vehicle violations.

Even with fully functioning brakes, it can take the length of a football field for a tractor-trailer to stop from highway speeds. The laws of physics weigh heavily against people in passenger vehicles colliding with large trucks; 97 percent of those killed in such crashes were occupants of the passenger vehicle in 2013, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Websites and smartphone apps are dedicated to letting truckers know whether weigh stations are open.

“The ones that actually drive into the weigh stations, those are the ones we probably don’t need to be looking at,” said Wes Pemble, a former Minnesota inspector who now works as a safety consultant with trucking companies. “Some have reason to make a good effort to get around those weigh stations.”

Maintaining equipment is expensive and time consuming, too, and many drivers are paid by the mile, an incentive to cover as much ground as quickly as possible.

While most drivers are careful about safety, some cut corners, the truckers acknowledged.