These drivers need to slow down. This driving like raped apes has to stop. This violation ticket just doesn’t cut it. I can see this type of ticket for a regular vehicle but a truck of this size packing this much weight needs to have a hefty fine. Just my opinion…..

Pay peanuts get monkeys

Last week in the Pine pass near Honeymoon Creek this chip truck did the same thing.

{url][IMG]http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a359/sledhed/ExcelCrashinthePinePass.jpg[/IMG][/url]

[IMG]http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a359/sledhed/ExcelCrashinthePinePass.jpg[/IMG]

Copy and paste it I guess!

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a359/sledhed/ExcelCrashinthePinePass.jpg

I bet he was hoping no trains were coming.

“These drivers need to slow down. This driving like raped apes has to stop. This violation ticket just doesn’t cut it. I can see this type of ticket for a regular vehicle but a truck of this size packing this much weight needs to have a hefty fine. Just my opinion…..”

There is a thing called the National Safety Code. The owner of the trucks must have one and abide by their regulations. A ticket like that will get a lot of demerit points and there will be some action taken by CVSE and NSC people. Its one thing the public knows little about.

These crashes are usually caused by not paying attention.

I forgot to mention the color of the one laying on the tracks. It’s blue.

Traveling through the Pine Pass to Chetwynd this morning, out of nine semis coming towards me, five were over the center line.

Too many top gun truck drivers on the roads these days.

Hauling distances getting too long?

Gus, in your world would long haul truck drivers be banned?

The biggest reason for most of these types of crashes is speed.

Things like animal avoidance and mechanical failure are often blamed, but in fact if the operator of the truck is traveling at a safer speed, it is easier to avoid other problems.

How do you get them to travel at a safer speed? On way is to allow them more time to finish their trip. How to you do that? Their employer. Canfor, West Fraser, Carrier, Sinclair Group, Dunkleys. Their computers tell them what they think the turn around time should be, but do they ever actually get in a truck and see what it really takes? NOPE.

Most truck drivers i know are actually better drivers than 90% of other people, this truck wasnt going that fast, (i saw the accident just after it happened, tracks arent very long so he wasnt going overly fast, looked more like he tried to miss something…

whatintheheck: Do you even know what the penalty for ‘driving without due care and attention’ is?

What would be nice if some contractors would stop grossly under bidding for jobs.
Basically low balling themselves out of profit in turn under paying drivers or having to hire under qualified drivers.
I myself have taken very low paying driving positions,One hauling crews that I got paid 28 cents a Km one way and deadhead back for 0,But if they had a return only got half the pay per k`s and they were always trying to get me to fudge my log book…you got 3 guesses and the first 2 don`t count what happened when I refused to do that.needless to say, I refuse to drive tired and the only reason I kept to the speed limit was out of respect for the crew members I was hauling.

AAV ….. I asked about the hauling distances getting too long. These truckers are not hauling Florida oranges to Alaska or whatever. To me, that would be a long haul trucker.

I just figured that if they are reaching the limit that they would push the limit by pushing the speed. Would this be a wrong assumption?

gus, it doesnt matter if the haul is 2 hours or 14 hours, if the cycle time is to short they are forced to travel at a higher speed than may be comfortable.

Lobar is a Canfor contractor, they are well known for cutting cycle times to the bone.

I know that the Chief Forester wrote in his last AAC report that the hauling distance to some of the dead pine stands left to the northwest of us was geting very long. He was looking at options to compensate – move the logs to different mills, build mills closer to the wood, increase the number of truckers available, and even completing/fixing some rail and shipping that way.

So, yes, I was suggesting that cycle time was getting to short as you put it.

I would think that if it gets longer than 14 hours, they are hooped and will have to make arrangements to sleep somewhere, provide a short term storage yard along the way, drop off trailered loads to be picked up by a tag team member, etc. I am not into the logistics of how that works, I just know that it is supposed to get to the point where something has to be done to deal with the logistic problem they face or will be facing.

As far as speed and driving time goes, I understand that there is at least one larger transport company in town that uses GPS tracking for their fleet to monitor whether they are driving too fast and too long. An auditor had told me that about 5 years ago. Don’t know if it is still true.

They were doing that in Ontario and Manitoba on some long haul roads to make sure that speed limits were not exceeded.

I know of several companies in town that use gps, this contractor involved does as well im told..

That piece of road by Ruby Lake is downright nasty with sharp corners, including a blind corner and hills. It’s a wonder this doesn’t happen more often along there.

I’m waiting for someone to lose their load coming off of Chief Lake on to the Hart.

The comments on the driver and actions surrounding this accident are totally out of line. Passing judgment on something without any knowledge of the matter is really a waste of time at best and a dangerous thing at worst. Who would like to be publicly judged without being able to defend or explain themselves?
Let’s just be thankful that the driver wasn’t killed or anyone else for that matter. Then, why not wait for the investigation to finish. I personally talked to someone who was there and he says the total skid marks were about 125 feet. This is on loose gravel with a loaded logging truck. Hardly sounds like going too fast to me if that is the case. Maybe he did try to ‘miss something’. If that is so, then the guy should be commended for trying rather than condemned for something he may or may not have done.

“The RCMP believe speed was a factor in this incident. A violation ticket for Driving Without Due Care and Attention was issued to the driver.”

PGX

Skid marks would not be an indication of speed in this incident, it would be an indication of when he felt he had a problem. The way the truck went over it would have come to a sudden stop with the trailer, bunks and cabguard grabbing the ground.

The particular corner has a 50 km speed limit if I am not mistaken and I can tell you that is plenty fast enough.

Gus,

Currently log haulers are allowd a max of 15 hours per day of on service time and a max of 13 hours driving time.

There are a few hauls in this region which are reaching in and around the 12.5 hour mark.

Mills are making changes because of the distance. Dunkley Lumber is currently putting in a rail line and offload area for rail cars, as well as rail yards near Mackenzie and Fort St James.

One other factor that has not been mentioned here is simple human error. For the amount of logs moved in this area, as well as heavy traffic in total, there will be some human error. The bigger the push to add drivers, the more human error we will see.

yes, but with the weight of the truck, if it has been going excessively fast, it would have plowed a lot further off the road than it did.

funkyrider,

I guess it depends on what “excessively fast” is in your world.

A 50 km per hour corner for a regular car or pickup may not be a 50 km per hour corner for a loaded logging truck.

faxman – cops pretty much have to write out a ticket for something to exonerate their existence which is basically to collect money through tickets to support the state.

I am fairly confident that as the process works it way through, if and when it goes to court, which is generally the case when it involves a Class 1 driver, I think it will be determined as to what actually happened.

Please remember that tickets are alleged offences, and therefore open to being contested.

I am not giving this driver a free pass and trying to defend him; I am, however unwilling to hop on the bandwagon of condemning the driver out of hand, and playing judge and jury without having all the facts before me.

We live in a society where it is far too easy to pass judgments on others via the internet and have no ramifications.

The biggest problem in the trucking industry is various unions competing with each other for members union dues.

Each union is willing to under bid the other unions on bad trip rates with straight rate pay for over time… they say so that they can keep ‘their members’ working….

In reality most union workers in the trucking industry would be better off working non union where labor laws apply and overtime pay is mandatory and not negotiated away by their bargaining agents. The bargaining agents (unions) make their living selling off their members short of the labor laws that otherwise would apply and the companies love them for it.

The companies love unions that compete with other unions for member dues. Classic divide and conquer and Canfor is a leader in this respect.

It should be illegal for unions to negotiate away legal labor rights that would otherwise apply to non union workers in order to compete for union dues. Trip rate schemes that factor out overtime pay would be a start. IMO it is not only a safety issue, but also an issue of fairness.

PGX: “We live in a society where it is far too easy to pass judgments on others via the internet and have no ramifications.”

Didn’t you just pass judgement on the police at the top of your last post?

PGX: “faxman – cops pretty much have to write out a ticket for something to exonerate their existence which is basically to collect money through tickets to support the state.”

Yup. In any case, judgments are going to happen, and we may not agree with them all.

Eagleone,

I think you must speak for the Chip Truck drivers.

Virtually no unionized logging truck drivers, gravel truck drivers or highway truck drivers.

Your point about the union and trucking may very well be correct, Chip Truck drivers are the lowest paid drivers in the local industry by a farly large amout. The loggers and gravel boys make a fair bit more. Highway guys, well, they get paid what they are worth, and in most cases that isnt much.

I find it a little interesting that so many folks want to dive so deep into incidents and ignore simple facts. In this case…

That corner is a nasty one. I don’t like driving my SUV around that corner; I can’t imagine wrestling a 63,000 kg log truck, even at 30 km/h, around that corner! For all those that are willing to incriminate the driver – have you seen this corner?

As PGX and others have pointed out – maybe he was avoiding an obstacle. I spend a fair bit of time myself in rural areas around PG and there are a lot of loose pets wandering around. On top of that, let’s not forget that we live in a northern community where there’s lots of wildlife. That’s great, except when the wildlife is going about being wild on the roadways. If you were driving along and something jumped out in the way, no matter what you were driving, wouldn’t you try to avoid it? And even if you say “no”, can you blame someone else for trying to?

Anyways, the biggest point is this: I’m pretty sure nobody that’s posted a comment here watched the whole thing happen; nobody here has seen and digested the GPS readings from the truck; nobody had a personal interview with the driver the morning of the crash to find out if he was tired, stressed out etc.; nobody was in the cab of the truck when it happened. This guy’s career is on the line right now undoubtedly, so let’s not make things harder on him. It could be any one of us next – I’m sure none of us realize how often in a day we’ve been mercifully spared from the consequences of things we’ve done, and if someone here can’t admit that, may I submit that they can’t admit to the truth.

(AAV) I know a few chip truck drivers and they arent that low in pay… when i was hauling logs last summer a fellow i know hauling for excel was only 400 a month less than i was making, another example is edgewater who pays their drivers the same hourly rate for chips or logs with o/t after 9 hrs.