Deputies Inspect Commercial Trucks for Safety Violations

By Bill Brubaker (Contact)

Sunday, July 29, 2007

It takes a fairly ramshackle truck to surprise Loudoun County Senior Deputy Sheriff Chris Rizzo, who specializes in identifying commercial vehicles that are unfit for the road. Rizzo, after all, has been inspecting trucks on Northern Virginia roads for 17 years.

But Rizzo recently spotted a truck he considered especially dangerous. “This guy was hauling mulch and had been stopped by a Virginia state trooper just a week earlier,” he said. “The trooper had found about 30 violations. Every kind of violation you could think of — from a flat tire to turn signals not working to brakes needing adjusting.”

The state trooper had ordered the truck off the road until the problems were fixed. Yet when Rizzo stopped the driver the following week, most of the repairs had not been made.

“And that’s why we have truck inspections,” Rizzo said Wednesday on Old Ox Road (Route 606), where the sheriff’s department had set up its monthly commercial motor vehicle checkpoint.

Like truck inspectors across the nation, Loudoun’s are on the road almost every day, stopping vehicles that have obvious safety deficiencies. In the first half of this year, Loudoun deputies inspected 1,007 trucks and put 572 out of service, according to the sheriff’s department.

“One of the biggest problems is that many drivers don’t inspect their own trucks each morning before they start their trips,” Rizzo said.

On Wednesday morning, deputies pulled over 19 trucks and put nine out of service. A total of 64 safety violations were found, and 15 tickets were issued, during the 661/27-hour sweep. The tickets averaged about $100 each.

A typical stop was the dump truck driver who was pulled over as he was hauling dirt from a construction site on Route 606.

“This is the second time I’ve been stopped in this truck,” said Sergio Flores, a driver for C.W. Strittmatter, a Manassas Park-based trucking firm. “The first time, they found problems with the tires. This time, it was my brakes.”

Flores phoned his company, then waited in the truck for almost an hour before a mechanic arrived. Two hours after he had been stopped, the brakes were fixed, and he was cleared by deputies to continue his run.

“Generally, these inspections work. They are a good deterrent,” Rizzo said. “Usually, if I put a company’s trucks out of service a few times, and they get hit with a bunch of fines, they start to learn and fix stuff. But, of course, some guys are slower learners. Every single time, it’s the same stuff over and over again.”

The inspections can be tough work, crawling under dump trucks and garbage trucks to spot problems that could endanger the lives of the drivers and others.

“Always the most common violation is brakes,” said Rizzo, who examines about 40 trucks a month. “The brakes need adjustment, and there are worn-out brake lines. Or sometimes they are not working at all. The second-most common problem is with . . . trucks not properly securing the loads they are carrying.”

Rizzo recently stopped a truck carrying 20,000 pounds of old truck wheels.

“But his tailgate lock was totally broken off, so the only thing holding these wheels on the truck was a strap,” he said. “And the strap had already broken, so the driver had tied it in a knot. It was basically useless, not able to hold any kind of weight. And that’s pretty dangerous.”

The deputies also find cracks in the frames of some trucks. “Rather than fix them, they’ll fill them with putty and just paint over them, trying to hide the cracks,” Rizzo said. “They end up going on the road with a truck that’s ready to break in half.”

Rizzo said he deliberately set up last week’s checkpoint near the truck yard of a repeat offender: New Vision Trash and Disposal Services.

“I’ve got a problem with them,” he said. “It seems that every time we stop their trucks, we find something wrong.”

By the end of the morning, the deputies had stopped five New Vision trucks and ordered two out of service. All told, 44 of the company’s trucks have been temporarily taken off the road in the past 15 months, according to the sheriff’s department.

In a telephone interview, Ishmael Wright, New Vision’s owner, said that statistic isn’t “bad” because his company’s trucks have been inspected “hundreds of times.”

Master Deputy Clark Jackson, a 29-year sheriff’s department veteran, joked to Rizzo on Wednesday that he was disappointed not to have turned up a single violation on a New Vision truck he had just inspected.

“I’ll tell you what, that hurt,” Jackson said, his brown uniform smudged with dirt. “Getting dirty and smelly and not being able to give him a ticket!”

“But look at the bright side,” Rizzo said. “At least you’re getting the message to them — and they are getting their trucks safe.”

Tagged: police

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