Big birds to fly by truck
Writing on the New York Times blog yesterday, Matthew L. Wald delivered a little unexpected news about a flock of young whooping cranes currently settled down for the winter about 45 miles southwest of Decatur, Ala.: they would travel the last leg of this year’s winter journey, led in large part by ultralight aircraft used by scientists attempting to help the cranes reestablish population numbers, by…

You guessed it, I’d bet. “The only way to get the cranes moving,” Wald wrote, “will be to put them in crates and drive them by truck to the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge near Decatur, Ala., she said, where six or seven whooping cranes, alumni of earlier migrations, are already wintering.”

Read Wald’s full story for more. Or follow the journey’s progress on the Operation Migration blog here.

Reading up
Salon.com writer Irin Carmon’s “The latest Twitter revolution” story, about last October’s Truck Driver Social Media Convention is live at the political/cultural news and commentary site as of yesterday. Aside from a whiff of stereotyping sitting there in the very first line — “Rich Wilson is telling a roomful of truckers how to sound less like, well, truckers” — the piece gets the whole of the event, organized with a boatload of tireless dedication by Allen and Donna Smith over at AsktheTrucker.com, fairly well. If you need some background on driver-led efforts at regulatory policy influence to emerge from the meeting, you can start with this item from Channel 19.

Whether you attended the event or not, I’m interested in what you think about the story from both substance and driver image standpoints. Tell me. Read it here.

As for the section therein about Overdrive‘s early years, there’s a much more detailed account I wrote (“Breaking Free”) for our 50th-anniversary issue last year.

Here we go again
I bet you can guess where this is going: The Discovery Channel is launching yet another reality TV show about drivers, making it the fourth such series from as many cable networks in the past year alone. The show, “World’s Toughest Trucker,” is a competition that sounds similar to the History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers’ franchise in that it looks to crown a winner in the end, after competitors face a set of tough runs — with a $150,000 cash prize going to the toughest competitor in this case. Hauls will take place on roads in different locales around the world, though, in a single season, a significant difference.

The show premieres on Feb. 13 at 10:30 p.m. Here’s what a press release from the cable channel had to say about it:

WORLD’S TOUGHEST TRUCKER contestants hail from around the world, including the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Australia and Sri Lanka. All the drivers come vastly experienced but, like athletes in specific sports, each driver brings a particular skill set to the competition. They also bring their share of personal quirks and trademarks. There’s “Ice Man” Derek Martin, cool under pressure and used to the slick and steep roads of his native Canada; the wild and wily Alabaman/rookie, whose mouth can run faster than his rig; and the explosive Aussie loner Rodney Johnson, who always seems to find teamwork to be the toughest part of the assignment.

WORLD’S TOUGHEST TRUCKER begins Down Under as the truckers encounter river crossings, dust holes and dry creek beds in the parched region of northeastern Australia. In this first challenge, the teams won’t allow anything to get in their way, but will one pair live to regret stopping to help and rescue passengers in an overturned car?

You can find more about it here.

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Tony Justice moving down the road
First up, Allen Smith over at AsktheTrucker.com reports Tony Justice (featured in the blog here and here and last month in Truckers News) will be performing at a pre-Grammy Awards showcase in Hollywood Feb. 12. Congrats, Tony! If you haven’t seen it as yet, look for his excellent “On the Road” trucking-country record at Pilot stores nationwide. For more about the show, check out the AsktheTrucker.com story here.

Cumberland Collective revisited
Secondly, I know at least a few of you will happily recall my post back in December about the Cumberland Collective crew of songwriters/players in my hometown of Nashville, Tenn., here — and one of them in particular, whose “Somewhere New” track evokes nothing if not the freedom of the long road. I caught their regular show at the Belcourt Taps & Tapas venue here last month, and shot some selected moments from four of the songwriters’ tunes, culminating with the band’s performance of Collins’ tune. Enjoy it below.

The collective’s next Belcourt show is tomorrow — Thursday, Feb. 2 — if you’ve got downtime in Nashville, or live in the region.

The writers/singers in the vid are, in order of appearance, Clay Evans, Connor Rand, Mike Willis and Noah Collins. Debra Gordon and Jason Eskridge are on backing vocals here, clearly visible. For info on the remainder of the group, check out their Facebook page.

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Since I reported on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s attempts to gain new regulatory authority over interstate drivers relative to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program’s now-internal Driver Safety Measurement System last summer, new wrinkles have emerged in Senate bill S.1950. This bill caused an uproar over the fact that it would, among other things, mandate electronic onboard recorders for hours of service compliance for virtually all interstate carriers.

But, as they say, the lead may well have been buried — language in the bill, says Drew Anderson, director of sales for the CSA data mining services firm Vigillo, would in effect give the Department of Transportation expanded authority to disqualify a driver from operating in interstate commerce. In essence, this is the Senate’s attempt to make reality what so many drivers feared about the CSA program when information about it was initially rolled out to the public: that the DOT was about to get into the business of rating drivers and, based on those ratings, revoking CDLs.

“Under the present statutes,” says J.J. Keller’s Tom Bray, “the only time a driver can be disqualified by the FMCSA is if the driver is found to be an ‘imminent hazard’ under 383.52 or the driver disregards a Notice of Claim,” a levied fine for a violation.

The section of concern in S.1950 is 310, which deals with the definition of “disqualification” of a driver in the federal code.

Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who introduced the bill, “want FMCSA to ramp up the DSMS side of CSA,” says Anderson. “If that legislation passes as is, the federal government will have the ability to put the driver out of service, off the road, and suspend their license.”

The chances of that legislation passing, judging by a similar bill introduced in the last Congressional sessions, as Tom Bray points out, might be slim. No action has been taken on it since its early-December introduction.

Should it pass, “any of this would require rulemaking that has not even been proposed yet,” as Bray notes. “The FMCSA would need to pass rules to implement the provisions of the statute that would allow them to directly disqualify a driver. Driver SMS scores in the CSA program would tie into this as one possible reason the FMCSA would look to disqualify a driver in the future, but the FMCSA would have to get it into their regulations first.”

“We’re headed into an election year [where the economy is expected to be the biggest issue],” says Anderson, commenting on the lack of potential for much of this to proceed in any way quickly, then asking, ”Do you think the FMCSA wants to be in the position of putting drivers out of work?”

Language of Section 310 is included below, and for the full text of the bill, see this page.

Some related stories:
GAO recommends more transparency for CSA
A window on FMCSA’s CSA driver-enforcement authority goals
Report: FMCSA wants to release driver safety data
CSA: Compliance plus or safety politics?
Language lurking in GAO’s CSA report to Congress

SEC. 310. FEDERAL DRIVER DISQUALIFICATIONS.

(a) Disqualification Defined- Section 31301, as amended by section 205 of this Act, is amended–

(1) by redesignating paragraphs (6) through (15) as paragraphs (7) through (16), respectively; and

(2) by inserting after paragraph (5) the following:

`(6) `Disqualification’ means–

`(A) the suspension, revocation, or cancellation of a commercial driver’s license by the State of issuance;

`(B) a withdrawal of an individual’s privilege to drive a commercial motor vehicle by a State or other jurisdiction as the result of a violation of State or local law relating to motor vehicle traffic control, except for a parking, vehicle weight, or vehicle defect violation;

`(C) a determination by the Secretary that an individual is not qualified to operate a commercial motor vehicle; or

`(D) a determination by the Secretary that a commercial motor vehicle driver is unfit under section 31144(g).’.

(b) Commercial Driver’s License Information System Contents- Section 31309(b)(1)(F) is amended by inserting after `disqualified’ the following: `by the State that issued the individual a commercial driver’s license, or by the Secretary,’.

(c) State Action on Federal Disqualification- Section 31310(h) is amended by inserting after the first sentence the following:

`If the State has not disqualified the individual from operating a commercial vehicle under subsections (b) through (g), the State shall disqualify the individual if the Secretary determines under 31144(g) that the individual is disqualified from operating a commercial motor vehicle.’.

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Ohio resident and UPS driver Ron “Big Dog” Sowder (pictured) started his career with UPS in 1962 after serving in the Navy and answering an employment ad. On January 25, the driver marked 50 years hauling for the company — all of it without an accident. Sowder’s 4 million-plus safe miles have made him the longest-serving active member of the company elite “Circle of Honor” group of UPS safe drivers with 25-plus years of service to the company’s customers.

If you were listening to Morning Edition on NPR today you may have heard this interview with Sowder by host Steve Innskeep about the accomplishment. Among Sowder’s observations about how the work of driving has changed over the years is one those of you who’ve been on the roads for decades will no doubt see no small measure of truth in, I’d imagine: “The old saying used to be courtesy is contagious — not so much any more. You let people in, and that’s that. Only about one out of 50 can bring themselves to throw their hand up, thanks….” Read or listen to more from him here.

All the same, here’s congrats to Sowder on the milestone. Keep on trucking’.

Photos courtesy of UPS.

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“I was on my way back to Texas and didn’t have a webcam,” says Roadrunner Transportation Services contractor Glenn Keller about the circumstances in which he filmed what has become a winning entry to take part in CNN’s 2012 Fit Nation Triathlon Challenge. “I pulled off the interstate, went into a Walmart and bought what I figured would be my last bucket of chicken wings and a webcam. I sat there in the seat of my truck and just tried to speak from my heart.”

The 51-year-old operator, here pictured, now begins a journey toward losing weight and getting fit enough to compete as part of CNN’s team, alongside Dr. Sanjay Gupta and six teammates, at the 2012 Nautica Malibu Triathlon. Keller estimates he could lose up to 100 pounds or more to get his weight to an ideal state. You can watch his winning video via this link, or check it out embedded below. Read more about the Fit Nation program.

Keller’s not the only driver working this year toward getting fit. Check out the debut of Truckers News’ “Go for the Goal” feature series and health program in the January issue here.

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Animal rights advocates are a vocal bunch, as I’ve found out over the course of the last several years. Write word one about Tony, the tiger at the Tiger Truck Stop in Gross Tete, La., and you can pretty much place your bets on a blizzard of commentary coming your way. Until recently, much of that commentary, including some of it from actual driver readers of the blog here, has taken the side of the advocates who prefer Tony’s removal from the stop, often suggesting a big-cat sanctuary in Florida as the preferred final home.

After a recent court ruling that held the Tiger Truck Stop’s permit for displaying the big cat was invalid, however, another group stood up and spoke out, defending the truck stop owner. Among them was owner-operator Gordon Alkire (pictured), whom you may recall for his part in Overdrive‘s 50th-anniversary coverage on the OverdriveRetro.com website last year. Alkire offered up the following commentary, reposted here with his permission:

So you think that Tony the tiger is in bad health, in an unsafe environment and should be removed. This is no different than removing a child from its home because of a busybody neighbor that reads something from nothing and never even had a child. It is life-altering for the child. The same can be said of the tiger. But it can’t speak and tell you it is unhappy or stubbed its toe, so it is taken care of the best way it can be. This tiger gets regular vet visits, real food — not the ground stuff your pets eat — and enjoys the attention. It is not alone. Tony has fresh air, a space of his own, not like in a zoo or a carnival.

I have seen dogs in trucks that are mistreated or not properly cared for, their diets no better than Mickey D’s two times a day. This truck stop is not hiding this tiger, as many other people have done with their pets, mistreating them.

This tiger is an icon. It is healthy. If this is so bad a situation for the tiger, why has it taken more than 10 years for these critics to get involved?

The answer is simple. The situation is neither bad nor dangerous for Tony. This uproar strikes me as driven by the attraction of getting on some bandwagon for certain individuals, to be a part of something, no matter the pain or suffering or cost it causes for someone else. They are searching for their 15 minutes of fame at the expense of someone else. Namely, the owner of the truck stop. It is called mob mentality in some circles. The writers of some anti-Tony the tiger stories are only seeking attention, and feel the need to do anything to get it at other people’s expense.

Unfortunately, Tony happens to be the target now.

I have a suggestion for the anti-Tiger enthusiasts. Pay attention to your surroundings and go after the drivers and dog owners that mistreat their animals. How about the drivers that have 100-pound-plus dogs in a six-by-eight-foot cab and only take them out for short walks to do their business and rush them back into the cab again. That is mistreatment of animals, as a dog this size needs room to grow and stay active. Or what about the drivers who think using a stick to beat a dog to make it mind is OK? I’ve seen it happen.

Tony has been in this truck stop for more than 10 years, and only in the last two or three has this action to remove him surfaced.

Among all these non-experts, including some truckers, the biggest are those who begin to think they are experts in tiger care and truck stop management and demand Tony’s removal while knowing absolutely nothing about the situation, all the while refusing to listen to both sides of the problem.

It is time to give it a rest. Leave Tony alone.

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Owner-operator Jimmy Ardis of Sumter, S.C., leased to Moultrie, Ga.-based Sapp Trucking, learned to drive “in a 1971 International 4070 cabover with a 250 Cummins in it,” he says, running to the West Coast and back. He’d driven farm tractors prior to that. “I pretty well had it mastered by the time I went over the road.“

This might be a story emblematic of so many owner-operators’, but for the fact that, as is well evident in the photo here, Ardis lost his left arm at the age of six to cancer. Against the odds, this year at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky., the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association will present Ardis with an award acknowledging his now 4 million miles of safe driving. “It is a pretty big milestone in my life,” he says. “I have walked amongst the best of the best now.”

And what a milestone it is, given that at age six in Oklahoma, Ardis was at one point not expected to reach his next birthday. “I had sarcoma cancer,” he says. “I had an uncle in med school at the University of Oklahoma. He’d picked me up by my arm, and when he did I passed out. They rushed me to a joint clinic in Oklahoma City — I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Doctors did exploratory surgery on Ardis, telling his parents they didn’t like what they were seeing — “When we go in, if we have to, we’re going to take his arm off,” they said.

“They didn’t tell me this,” Ardis says. “I woke up, and I didn’t have a left arm.”

The young Ardis never let it beat him, though. Records he received when his doctor in Oklahoma passed away several years ago show that doctors at one point estimated he may not make it past two weeks. Then they scheduled a six-month follow-up appointment. All clear. Then another six months. Pretty soon years had gone by without a single recurrence.

His early voyage into over-the-road truck driving hit a bump when at age 19 “they caught me driving,” he says. The fact that he didn’t have an arm disqualified him from running interstate with a chauffer’s license, but he determined early on that “I’m not going away, I’m going to drive a truck,” he says.

By then in Sumter, S.C., where he lives today, he went to a local vocational rehabilitation center that agreed to pay for him to go to truck driving school. The first night in the program, “they tried to kick me out because I only had one arm,” Ardis says.

He would eventually graduate no. 1 in his class.

But there was a catch. He bought his first truck and, back out looking for a lease, he realized the limitations of the federal waiver program for drivers missing limbs at the time. “It was a Catch-22 situation,” he says. “To get a waiver you had to have a driving job, and to get a job you had to have a waiver. Here I was with a truck and trailer, no income coming in, I’ve got a new baby that’s just been born, and my world was coming down on top of me.”

Elizabeth Dole was the Secretary of Transportation under President Ronald Reagan at the time. Her husband, Bob Dole, who would run for president in 1996, Ardis knew, had one of his arms crippled in World War II. “I wrote a letter to her,” he says. “My wife told me I was crazy, but Dole’s staff called my house three days after receiving the letter. The phone call was to make arrangements to have a field tester to come to our house and test me and give me my waiver.”

Around the same time, Richard Beauchamp of then Atlanta-based Refrigerated Transport and vice president of the Georgia Trucking Association received a letter Ardis had written him. “This is a Cinderella deal the way it all came together,” Ardis says. “He called me: ‘This is Richard Beauchamp of Refrigerated Transport – I got a call from Elizabeth Dole…’”

He wanted Ardis to drive his truck to Georgia for testing as part of the on-boarding process. “I said, ‘I can’t be there until I get a waiver,’” says Ardis. “He said, ‘They’ll let you drive that truck to Atlanta,’” where the Refrigerated Transport drive tester told him, “you’re a natural born truck driver”

Two years on, Ardis was Refrigerated’s top earning owner-operator, he says, and the rest is history.

“I’m scrutinized by the federal government every two years for the waiver,” he says, but “my driving record is spotless. I haven’t had a ticket since 1994-95, and I reckon the reason I’ve done so well in trucking is that I’ve been surrounded by a bunch of great drivers and people in the industry who cared about me through the years.

“Trucking’s been very good to me. I’m very proud of what I do, and I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished – I don’t know of anybody who’s driven this far safely with only one arm.”

Keep on trucking, Jimmy.

My colleague James Jaillet had the chance to meet with Ardis yesterday in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he took the pictures in the gallery below of the owner-operator and his immaculate 2007 379, powered by a 475 Cat turned up to 500 hp, 10 speed overdrive transmission and 3:55 rears. Give them a look, and for more about Ardis, you can check out his “Monkey Gouger” (that’s his CB handle, yes, garnered at a young age) website here.

Owner-operator Jimmy Ardis

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If you missed last night’s State of the Union address, the President followed in predecessors’ footsteps by detailing a veritable laundry list of election-year policy initiatives with no small measure of specific requests for the deadlocked Congress — many of which, it’s sure, will not see the light of day this year.

All the same, Obama’s vision for boosting American economic prospects holds potential good news for drivers in the area of future infrastructure rebuilding, and picks some low-hanging fruit in two key areas in which some of the good news for owner-operators has long been in the making: American manufacturing and energy production.

Manufacturing production indices have risen, along with truck rates, throughout the last year and a little more, as this recent news item, among others, makes clear. Natural gas production from shale, in particular, saw a lot of attention in the State of the Union address. In this month’s Overdrive, I wrote about Pennsylvania-based dry bulk owner-operator Steven Bixler (pictured, with his wife, Doris), also part of Truckers News’ 2011 Great American Trucking Family, who’s well benefited from the uptick in gas production in the Marcellus Shale Ridge in and around Pennsylvania, hauling sand to well sites and averaging “$5,000 a week,” he says, for his trouble.

That $5,000, too, is garnered on an average of just 900 to 1,200 miles put under his classic 1989 Freightliner cabover. “We load at rail yards, and one spot in Buffalo where it comes off of a barge,” Bixler says. “We blow it off of into storage tanks at the well site.” Job well done.

Not bad for $5 a mile, is it? “I’ve been telling people that for the first time in 12 years as an owner-operator, I’m making money,” Bixler says. “It’s a very lucrative deal we’ve got going.”

Shale gas mining is ongoing in several sites around the country, with a particularly large volume of production in North Dakota. Find more data about this and other lucrative niches (tank, energy and, surprise surprise: intermodal, flatbed) in my “Chasing the green” story in this month’s Overdrive.

Bonus: Want to cut through the opinion no doubt crowding today’s airwaves? If perhaps you missed the State of the Union address last night, likewise the response by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, I’ve embedded videos of each below. Judge for yourself.

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What happens when a loaded straight dump loses its brakes on a downhill run and collides head-on with a tanker truck loaded with jet fuel? Not what you might expect. Reporter Brett Kelman, writing in the Pacific Daily News, reports that Guam Governor Eddie Calvo (pictured) was proclaiming the relatively ho-hum aftermath, with mostly minor injuries, as an act of God.

On the way to the big collision, the dump missed the governor by a mere five feet, Kelman reported. “Calvo was sitting in his car, stopped at a red light across from his office, when the dump truck whizzed by, crushing the northbound tanker truck’s front as it crossed the intersection,” Kelman wrote. The fuel hauler was loaded with 9,500 gallons. Combine the lack of a fuel tank breach with the near miss, and you’ve got a recipe for as clear a case of divine intervention as one could dream up. At least for Calvo — the tanker truck driver wasn’t so fortunate, though both he and the dump driver survived the accident.

In addition to his gubernatorial duties, Calvo pens a column for the newspaper. Kelman summarized Calvo’s post-accident column’s thrust by quoting these sentences: “The good Lord served me up a reminder. He reminded me to live each day as though it might be my last day; to greet each and every moment, each day, each activity and each person as if God was watching — watching your final day on Earth.”

Read Kelman’s full story here, and stay in the moment, safe, out there.

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