By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

Between 2001 and 2006, South Carolina was the scene of 513 fatal truck accidents and of nearly 1,000 truck accidents involving hazardous materials, according to statistics compiled by several U.S. Department of Transportation agencies.

The cost of the 958 accidents involving hazardous material alone was $3.2 million dollars, according to the National Highway Safety Administration.

While no lives were lost in connection with this category of crashes, the mishaps did result in some eight injuries, one of which was classified as “serious” by federal regulators.

These numbers are significant, but they’re dwarfed by national figures. In 2005 alone, for instance, the NHSA recorded a total of 442,000 accidents entailing large trucks; of those, a little more than 1%, or 4,932, involved fatalities.

But the fiery crash this July of an 18-wheeler on the Mark Clark Expressway, an accident that killed five and injured four others, has catapulted the issue of truck safety, particularly of those trucks moving in and out of Charleston’s busy port terminals, into the forefront of many people’s minds.

However, where a lot of people are only talking about the issue, one local logistics provider has taken a step toward making the Lowcountry’s roads safer.

To Jerry Ward, president of Blackhawk Logistics in Hanahan, making horrific accidents like the July 13 incident here even more rare is a question of balance, or more specifically, of weights and measures.

Days after the Mark Clark crash, he unveiled a public truck scale at his North Rhett Road facility that he hopes will improve truck safety, enhance the region’s logistics efficiency, and possibly generate a little additional revenue for his company.

“When I first began to consider the $125,000 investment in the scales, my first thought, obviously, was ensuring that our trucks were properly loaded and weren’t going to run into inspection- or accident-related problems down the road,” Ward said.

“The other piece is that, as a logistics and warehousing company, we charge our customers by the weight of the products and materials they want us to transport. Having our own certified scale in the yard enables us to provide our customers with exact cost figures rather than with estimates.”

But given the public perception of large, freight-moving trucks as rolling death machines, and the legitimate safety concerns shared by the trucking community as a whole, Ward decided to open his gates to other companies in the area 24 hours a day and allow them to weigh their trucks for the nominal charge of $5.

At that rate, he said, he might recoup the cost of the scale in three to five years while making interstates 26 and 526 a little safer for everybody. And that’s where the overall weight and the balance come into play.

The federal government currently mandates a gross weight limit of 80,000 pounds for trucks traveling the nation’s interstates, though carriers can and often do request “overweight permits” that allow them to carry as much as 90,000 pounds on the open road.

“One way in which public scales make for better safety is that they enhance the driver’s knowledge of what he has to handle on a particular trip,” Ward said. He said there is another regional set of public scales in Summerville.

“Weight, after all, is a major determinant of how a truck will handle, if not the major determinant, and I think access to scales before you get out on the roads has a significant impact on drivers’ thinking. Too much weight will impact your ability to turn and to stop, and weight that’s not evenly distributed across your axles will have the same detrimental effect.”

Weight on specific truck axles is such an issue for truckers that Ward paid more to be able to measure weight per axle with his scales. Truckers can be hit with substantial fines if they exceed federal guidelines for weight per axle, even if their total load is below federal

maximums.

“It’s hard to say which measure is more important when it comes to preventing accidents out on the road, but weight per axle is very, very important,” Ward said. “Excessive weight on an axle is often found to be the major contributing factor when a truck suffers a blowout on the road.”

Anyone who’s driven an appreciable distance is familiar with the weigh stations that are as frequent as motorists’ rest stops on the nation’s interstates.

As a driver pulls into such a station, his truck passes over a rolling scale that measures the vehicle’s gross weight. If the truck is within the federally mandated limit, the driver gets a green light and proceeds on his delivery. If he gets a red, he has to pull around to the second scale, which measures weight per axle and gives inspectors an opportunity to impose greater scrutiny on the vehicle.

“If you’re overweight, you can be subject to a fine of $50 to $300. If your truck is extremely overweight, then they’ll park you until you can arrange to have some of your cargo offloaded onto another vehicle, all of which is costly, all of which takes time,” Ward said, “and in some cases, might inspire a driver to try to make up time by driving at an excessive speed.

“In a way, I guess I view the availability of a public truck scale much the same way the government views cargo container inspections—the closer you do your inspections to the source of the cargo, the safer the system will be,” he said.

“Look at the situation I described at the weigh station. If you knew you were riding excessively heavy before leaving the community you were originating from, you could simply drive back to the warehouse and offload your excess weight, saving time, saving frustration, and undoubtedly enhancing the safety of your trip,” Ward said.

Ward’s perspective seems to be catching on. On a recent Sunday, a total of 23 trucks rolled over his scales before heading out onto the road, he said.

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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