When Trucks and Bridges Collide

Truckers News Senior Editor Todd Dills is the author of a novel, Sons of the Rapture, and blogs daily at www.channel19.blogspot.com. Write him at tdills@rrpub.com or http://twitter.com/channel19todd.

As the country gets serious about bridge and highway infrastructure rehabilitation, more of it needs to get as serious about safety as it is about profit.

When the Missouri DOT announced in August that work would begin Sept. 8 on U.S. 136 Brownville Bridge over the Missouri River in the state’s northwest and that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be the source of revenue for the project, they sent to media crucial information that width restrictions would be dialed down to 102 inches for the next two construction seasons.

But the announcement missed a lot of the nationwide trucking media. Local economic needs dominated MoDOT’s reasons for keeping the bridge open, and local media outlets were the ones that ran with the information. One commercial tire shop, Graybill Tire & Repair, at 136 and I-29 a few miles from the crossing, undoubtedly knew the work was coming. I doubt they were expecting the boost in business.

One of Graybill’s many following first-time customers was Charlie Spicer, an owner-operator leased to Alpine Transportation of Vancouver, Wash., who was running with another Alpine hauler across the bridge when that hauler “clipped a trailer tire, and the guy in front of me blew a couple,” Spicer says. Spicer himself lost a tire on his tractor and a tire and wheel on his company trailer. Laid over at Graybill, which shares its lot with a truckstop, the next morning he met six other haulers in for similar repairs. He got on the phone to Alpine safety rep Angela Allen, who put in calls to the Missouri Department of Transportation. “We started with them,” Allen says, “and they gave us the contractor’s info.” The contractor, Allen adds, thinks MoDOT should be responsible because MoDOT is making them keep the bridge open. Contractor Cramer & Associates had originally planned to shut it down for the work.

“They told me I got one of the last tires they had,” Spicer says of the folks at Graybill, whom he talked to again when he stopped in on his return trip through the area. On that next trip, they told him “they’d had to go to Kansas City to get more, and they were kinda laughing about it.”