I got another little taste of the reality of the road, yesterday, when what outght to have been around 7-8 hours of driving between Rock Hill, S.C., and Nashville, Tenn., with a two-hour stop midstream, turned into a 13-hour saga. Just another day in your life, I know.
Everything started out fine, a brief visit with Georgia motor carrier enforcement officers at the southbound and northbound scales near the South Carolina border came and went on schedule.
Turned out an unannounced brake-check day was on nationally, and Georgia had its mobile performance-based brake tester unit set up on the NB I-85 scale in Lavonia ahead of the South Carolina border. Such units measure brake performance on individual axles, giving inspectors another window into where exactly to look for problems. Measures on each axle — broken out for both left and right sides — show a percentage value that inspectors want to be above 43.5% for that brake unit to be considered in good operating order.More on all of that later. I hit the road toward Atlanta and ultimately Nashville by noon Eastern time. Forty-five minutes on, this was the scene:
Dead stop–I85 sb in GA, MM 125: https://t.co/ylM3es5vk3 pic.twitter.com/xd2KbBlcCC
— Overdrive Magazine (@OverdriveUpdate) May 6, 2015
And behind me, looking back from where I’d then been sitting with the vehicle keyed off for at least a half-hour. See yours in there?
Here’s another of my cohorts in the hour-or-more stoppage.
The culprit for the stop? It wasn’t an accident. When I peered around the FedEx Ground 53-footer parked in front of me, this is what I saw.
On a day that saw a tornado touch down in Oklahoma and dire radio reports about how dry it is out in California as fire season kicks off, turns out a few roadside brush fires were to blame for this shutdown. Here the one ahead of me is shown after another Gwinnett County water truck arrived on the scene to douse this particularly persnickety blaze.
Things were briefly stop-and-go after traffic slowly rolled out and by, I counted, four separate spots that had been set ablaze. The cause? Undetermined, as reported by local media as yet. The roadside here in pine country is all a carpet of (this day) very dry pine needles, so a series of stray cigarettes might be possible. Though given the proximity of these blazes (all within a couple miles of road and simultaneous), it seems unlikely.That wasn’t the last delay I’d see. With some protracted slowdowns around Atlanta and in Chattanooga, I (joy) arrived in Nashville right at the local five-o’clock hour, just getting ahead of a multi-vehicle accident on I-24W around Harding Pike only to hit traffic into the downtown area at a standstill itself.
By the time I parked it, I was getting preciously close to what would have been the close of my 14-hour window in a different life. Drive time I might have maxed out entirely.
Sound familiar? Here’s hoping your Wednesday run was smooth.
