Inspections for log vehicles differ from most in state

Log truck drivers Larrence Ellis and Charlie Thompson have time for only a quick snack during a pit stop for fuel on a typical workday.

Those trips usually entail hauling rigs loaded with fresh logs to designated destinations — a task tied to what their paychecks look like.

“Gotta get that production,” Thompson said, gearing up to take the wheel of his 48-foot trailer to make the day’s load quota.

Besides making sure loads are secure, a more daunting task when delivering their cargo is negotiating between other vehicles on the road.

“It’s all the time, the last-minute braking,” Ellis said, describing his daily driving experience during his five years of driving for Columbia, Miss.-based Forest Products Transports. “It’s like, ‘Oh, here’s where I wanted to turn!’”

Standing in the shadows of a load of about 30 cedar logs aboard his 40-foot trailer, the Port Gibson native is quick to say how difficult it is to stop a truck loaded with 25 tons of logs traveling about 60 mph.

“It takes at least two football fields to come to a stop,” Ellis said.

A vital necessity for a major Mississippi industry to some and a driving hazard for many motorists, trucks like the ones driven by Ellis and Thompson remain a common sight on the state’s major highways.

Like most heavy road traffic, the trucks carrying cedar, oak, pine and other timber processed during harvest season, are inspected for possible safety risks such as bad brakes, low tire treads and working lights.

Those seemed to be in working order on a fully loaded log truck headed north on U.S. 61 North shortly before noon Jan. 11, as scores of law enforcement officials processed a fatal wreck scene involving big rigs.

As Vicksburg police and Warren County sheriff’s deputies sifted through what remained of a cement tanker and another truck carrying concrete beams, the log truck driver lost control and, for an instant, further catastrophe appeared imminent.

Beyond the sight of officers and rescue personnel who ran for cover, the log truck driver regained control.

An irate Sheriff Martin Pace radioed for extra traffic control farther south of the accident scene and ordered the driver stopped.

“Our concern was the inspection of the truck,” he said. The driver “did a pretty good job of avoiding an accident.”

While the Mississippi Department of Transportation Office of Law Enforcement was contacted, neither state nor local officials could do anything beyond checking for valid inspection stickers.

“They told us what we already knew,” Pace said.

County sheriff’s departments cannot inspect commercial big rigs for safe operation and use of on-board equipment. That task belongs to the Mississippi Department of Transportation’s law enforcement division and the Mississippi Highway Patrol.

State law governing the inspection of motor vehicles includes commercial trucks permitted to carry more than 10,000 pounds by its gross vehicle weight rating, or GVWR. It also contains 11 specific exemptions with various accompanying conditions, including school buses, hearses, emergency vehicles and certain farm equipment, among others.

Also listed are provisions protecting from inspectors’ eyes trucks carrying logs and gravel, indicative of the legislative influence wielded by industries supplying more than $1 billion to the state’s economy annually.

Described in the law, the exemption applies to “motor vehicles engaged in the transportation of logs and pulpwood between the point of harvest and the first point of processing the harvested product.”

Willie Huff, MDOT’s Law Enforcement Office director and a former police chief in Natchez, said trucks may be inspected at various weigh stations when empty — but not when they are loaded.

“We can weigh and check whether their loads are secure,” Huff said. “Things like glaring safety concerns like loose air lines, lights that don’t work, tires that don’t have enough tread.”

Drivers are checked for valid commercial driver’s licenses, Huff said, adding drivers of some farm trucks are exempt from needing a commercial license, usually $40 in Mississippi. By contrast, a regular driver’s license is usually $20. Fines for violations found can run from $500 to $1,000.

Self-employed loggers are subject to having a Class A license, which enables hauling loads more than 26,000 pounds, only if the logger is traveling more than 150 miles from his house, Mississippi Highway Patrol Capt. George White said.

Annual salaries of drivers and others in the forest services and logging sectors fell off a bit from the mid-1990s to the present decade, according to recurring studies by the Department of Forestry at Mississippi State University. More than 63,000 industry employees averaged about $25,500 in 1993. Ten years later, 52,580 forest industry workers average income was $24,853.

Huff said recent efforts to convey a message of safety in the industry have centered on education classes moderated by MDOT and regional logging associations, where instructional videos and diagrams are used to promote safe operation among drivers.

Seminars were held most recently in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Huff said, featuring programs showing companies how to self-inspect their trucks for brake problems and other potential safety hazards.

Also, state compliance manuals have been updated to reflect more aspects of trucker safety, such as properly securing loads that often trail the rear of most trucks by about 6 feet.

“Load securement is covered in our workshops and in the field,” said Jason Cutshall, manager for the Starkville regional office of Maryland-based Forestry Resources Association.

FRA participates in 10 to 12 workshops annually in Mississippi. While each session has no overriding theme or goal, the points covered derive from information from member loggers.

“We hope to do more across the state,” Cutshall said. “There’s good and bad, and the bad always captures the headlines.”

As seen with other loopholes and exemptions in state law, industry pressure on lawmakers to balance safety and economics is prevalent.

Huff said the litany of exceptions regarding log trucks makes for a “tough issue,” with plenty of efforts through the years to reduce the number of exceptions.

Newly elected Rep. Alex Monsour, R-Vicksburg, was named in January to the 29-member House Transportation Committee and has begun poring over a full slate of topics with others on the panel.

“It’s my first time dealing with transportation,” Monsour said, adding further study on inspection exemptions was on his to-do list for the session.

On the regulatory level, officials prefer to stick with what they describe as balanced approaches.

“You’ve got to look at both sides,” Huff said. “There’ll always be some who cut corners.”

In the interim, the state’s forest industry is expected to record another net decrease in the 2007 timber harvest as it recovers from Hurricane Katrina.

Marc Measells, a forestry researcher for the Mississippi State University, said two other factors that mitigated a rosy long-term outlook continue to affect the industry in varying ways.

“Drought conditions have allowed more harvest, driving down prices,” said Measells, adding the continuing nationwide housing slump figure devalues Mississippi’s delivered forest product.

In the university’s 2006 report on forestry in Mississippi, timber harvests were valued at $1.21 billion, just behind poultry and eggs as the state’s top agricultural commodity. The latter brought in $2 billion.

Overall, the timber harvest decreased more than 16 percent and severance tax collections were just more than $3.4 million, or 7.1 percent lower than 2005 — losses attributed to continuing hurricane recovery, increased imports and energy prices and the nationwide housing slump.

Measells predicted another decrease in the value of the state forestry product of about 8 percent.

The university’s report on the state of forestry in 2007 is being prepared by Measells and fellow researcher Dr. James Henderson. Results are expected by the end of the month, Measells said.

Janet Valdarchi and her neighbour Brian Ellison stress they are not against logging or log truckers, but they are concerned that traffic coming out a narrow section on Saxton Lake Road is unsafe.

Valdarchi and Ellison are also worried about the additional logging traffic coming onto Saxton Lake Road from a new piece of road built recently to connect to the Reid Lake area.

Valdarchi lives just off of Saxton Road at the turnoff to Vivian Lake, and Ellison lives at Vivian Lake, about 30 minutes northwest of the city past Chief Lake Road.

The connector road from the Reid Lake area comes onto Saxton right at the Vivian Lake turnoff. The two-kilometre stretch of road from there to the beginning of Saxton Lake Road is of particular concern to Valdarchi and Ellison.

They believe the road is too narrow for logging trucks to pass in both directions, and also believe the increased traffic creates a hazard for people who live in the area, especially when the road is slippery.

Both of them say the stretch of road should be widened, particularly if more beetle-killed timber is going to be taken out of the area.

“You just hold your breath — you don’t want to meet a logging truck,” said Valdarchi.

Ellison said he can’t understand why log truck traffic has been diverted from the Reid Lake area onto Saxton Road since there are more people that live in the area of Saxton Road, which turns into Ness Lake Road.

Ellison, who has started up a recreational site at Vivian Lake, is also concerned that logging trucks and RVs in the summer will be a bad mix. “Somebody is going to get hurt, before this is over,” he said.

The two-kilometre stretch of Saxton Road falls under the responsibility of the transportation ministry.

The ministry’s Fort George district manager Rick Blixrud said the difficulty in widening the road is the province owns only the road top, and it would be costly to purchase private property to widen it. He said there have been measures taken to improve safety, including posting proper signage, ensuring plowing and sanding are done and monitoring speeds. Blixrud noted that three speeding tickets were handed out by ministry staff last week, although he didn’t know what type of vehicles were ticketed.

Although Saxton, as a public road, is not technically a radio-assisted road, forest companies have put up radio calling and mileage signs, which Blixrud said he believes will also improve safety. Log trucks will often let other truck drivers know when and where there is other traffic on the road, he said. Log haulers have also been advised of school bus times as well.

Blixrud said he also believes that there is not likely to be log traffic during the summer months. He also noted that the transportation ministry had spent a considerable amount of money in the region to improve roads to stay ahead of the massive amount of beetle-killed timber being logged. He said $9 million — well above the district’s normal budget — was spent fixing up Chief Lake, Ness Lake and Nukko Lake roads to accommodate increased logging traffic.

“In our long-term plan we’ll look at some of those hot spots, but it takes time,” he said, referring to the section of Saxton Lake Road.

Greg Rawling, the Prince George district manager for the forests ministry, said the Reid Lake connector road was built quickly in January to alleviate concerns about logging truck traffic from Reid Lake residents.

A school bus driver and three students were taken to a Punxsutawney, Jefferson County, hospital with minor injuries after the bus they were riding in was hit by a log truck.

The school bus driver is 30 weeks pregnant.

All those injured were treated and released at Punxsutawney Area Hospital.

Police said the truck was trying to make a sharp turn when it slid. The bus driver was able to avoid the truck’s cab, but then hit the trailer.

Fire officials described the section of road as narrow but dry at the time of the wreck.

A pickup truck driver who ran a stop sign led police on a 48-mile, high-speed desert chase before he was killed during a rolling Interstate 10 shootout near Chiriaco (Shih-RAY’-koh) Summit.

A Cathedral City police officer tried to stop the pickup Thursday, but the driver sped away, reaching speeds up to 120 mph as the California Highway Patrol joined the desert chase 130 miles east of Los Angeles.

CHP Officer Tami Low says 32-year-old Johnnie Robert Lopez “opened the rear-window slider and starting shooting out the back of the truck.”

Three officers involved in the pursuit fired back and the wounded Joshua Tree man lost control of the pickup.

He was found dead in the truck.

Vehicle apparently swerved to avoid school bus, overturned on Northern Parkway

Two Baltimore Department of Public Works employees were injured yesterday when a Trash Truck overturned at Northern Parkway and Falls Road, knocked down a tree and hit four cars, city officials said. The intersection was closed to traffic for hours.

The workers, including the driver, were taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Police said their injuries were not considered life threatening.

Details of how the accident occurred were not immediately available. It happened shortly after noon and may have been triggered when the Truck driver swerved to avoid hitting a school bus,” said Kurt L. Kocher, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works.

Two lanes of westbound Northern Parkway were closed through 6 p.m., causing significant backups during the evening rush hour.

A sport utility vehicle crashed into a Chick-fil-A in Edgewater yesterday afternoon, injuring five restaurant patrons, two seriously, an Anne Arundel County fire official said.

The SUV crashed through the brick-and-glass exterior of the restaurant at 3220 Solomons Island Road about 12:30 p.m. and into the dining area, said Battalion Chief Michael Cox, a Fire Department spokesman.

A 67-year-old customer who was sitting directly where the car struck, in front of a handicapped parking spot, suffered serious injuries and was flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. A 6-year-old boy also was hurt and was taken by ambulance to Anne Arundel Medical Center, Cox said.

Three state troopers who were having lunch at the restaurant suffered “very minor” injuries, said 1st Sgt. David Jones, a Maryland State Police spokesman. They refused medical treatment and returned to work, he said.

“They just picked the wrong place to eat lunch,” Jones said.

The driver of the SUV was uninjured, Cox said. No additional information was available.

Demand for diesel-powered cars is soaring.

Diesel produces fewer greenhouse gases than unleaded petrol but it is more dangerous to our health. RICHARD BLACKBURN reports on an automotive dilemma.

Demand for diesel-powered cars is soaring. Australians bought more diesel cars in the first four months of this year than they did in the whole of 2005.

Sales this year are up 135 per cent on the same period last year and the latest figures show that almost 20 per cent of new vehicles sold this year are powered by diesel. In 2000, the figure was just 10 per cent.

However, the explosive growth is a double-edged sword.

The good news is that diesel-powered engines are more efficient than their petrol cousins and therefore emit less CO2 - the major contributor to global warming.

The bad news is that emissions from Diesel engines are harmful to your health. That includes the latest generation of so-called “clean” diesels.

The Federal Government’s Green Vehicle Guide, which ranks vehicles on their greenhouse gas and air pollution performance, doesn’t have a single diesel vehicle in its top 50 list of low polluters.

Just one makes the top 150 and there are only five in the top 200 vehicles.

Jon Real, a spokesman for the Federal Department of Transport, which maintains the guide, says diesel cars are marked down because they have a “much more significant health effect”.

He says diesels produce about the same amount of hydrocarbons as petrol but significantly more nitrogen oxides (NOx) - a precursor to smog - and particulate matter.

Air quality experts estimate that diesel engines produce particles at about 20 times the rate of petrol engines and it is those emissions that are bad for your health.

Particulate matter has been linked with thousands of deaths worldwide. Side effects range from cancer to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. NOx have also been linked to serious health problems, including asthma, respiratory disease, infections and reduced lung function in children.

A recent NSW parliamentary inquiry into air quality found that motor vehicles produce 71 per cent of NOx emissions in Sydney and just under 20 per cent of particle pollution.

Real says particulate matter emissions carry a hefty weighting in the department’s assessment of pollution effects from different vehicles. It’s easy to see why.

The most recent figures from the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics - for 2000 - put the annual death toll from vehicle exhaust pollution at between 900 and 2000 people - higher than the national road toll. It is also estimated to contribute to between 700 and 2050 asthma attacks in Australia each year.

Three top investors in the automotive industry painted a grim picture on Sunday for the sector in 2008, with one executive predicting a possible slump in U.S. sales to levels not seen in 15 years.

The weakest forecast is for a possible 9.4 percent decline. But all three — Jerry York, an adviser to billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian; financier Wilbur Ross; and Thomas Stallkamp, a former Chrysler president — were more pessimistic than many in the battered industry.

“While I am very negative on the autos sector over the next 12 to 18 months, I’m just not sure how bad it could be,” York, a former board member of General Motors Corp (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and chief financial officer of Chrysler, said at the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit. “We all know housing is a debacle.”

U.S. light auto sales could slip to 15.5 million or less next year, York said. That would be down from near 16 million this year, a drop of 3 percent to mark the second consecutive annual decline and the lowest tally since 1998.

Stallkamp, a partner at private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings, which owns several auto parts makers, said the market could slump to 14.5 million, the lowest level since 1993.

“I’d say it’s somewhere between 14.5 (million) and 15 (million), somewhere in there and it’s hard to tell,” he said. “Today, I’m a little more towards 14.5 (million).”

Such a decline would be felt throughout the sector, CSM Worldwide auto analyst Michael Robinet said.

“That would certainly be one of the worst years on record given the gravity of the industry,” he said.

U.S. auto sales fell almost 11 percent in 1991, when the economy was in recession.

Ross, an investor who specializes in restructuring troubled businesses and has assembled an auto parts empire through acquisitions, said the U.S. consumer was “pretty well tapped out” as he predicted auto sales would slip a few hundred thousand units from this year.

Most automakers have predicted U.S. auto sales next year in the range of just under 16 million to 15.5 million, with Japan’s Nissan Motor Co Ltd  at the low end.

However, the crumbling U.S. housing market is spooking consumers, the investors said.

“I hope I’m wrong on 14.5 (million) to 15 (million),” Stallkamp said. “But I think the mortgage issue is going to freak people out and that will hit pretty hard in ‘08.”

Ross called it “a sort of poverty effect from house prices going down.”

The U.S. automakers‘ market shares will suffer more than foreign rivals in such a weak market, Stallkamp said.

“You’re going to see some continued retrenchment in construction and the building trades that will hit the Big Three particularly,” he said.

The investors see the Big Three U.S. automakers cutting factory production instead of returning to overly generous discount deals such as GM’s zero-percent financing offers, first rolled out after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“I think you’re going to see less discounting in general,” Ross said. “Now that they have a little better control of the factories and now that the factories are a little more right sized.”

None of the three predicted a recession for the U.S. economy in 2008, but York said “it feels like it’s on the way.”

Stallkamp, on the other hand, sees global credit markets stabilizing in the first half of 2008, with the holiday shopping season a key indicator. He sees U.S. auto sales coming back in 2009.

The U.S. automakers, already slashing jobs and factory production, will “have to get smaller faster” and push for more sales overseas in a weaker market, Stallkamp said.

“Maybe I’m too pessimistic on how low it’s going to go,” he said of the U.S. market. “Maybe I live in Michigan. This is a pretty crummy place to be right now.”