Month: October 2012

A Mid-Michigan towing company is fighting breast cancer in an eye-catching way.

“The looks and staring, you don’t realize why they’re staring at you until you think about it twice and then you realize you’re in a giant pink truck. It’s kind of an eye catcher,” said Raymond Darabos, driver for Tim’s Towing. Her name is Lady Luck and she brings out the softer side of the men who work at Tim’s Towing in Linwood.

“You have green and yellow trucks then you drive a pink truck. It’s a lot different,” Darabos said.

Lady Luck is a true diamond in the rough story. Her good looks were hidden beneath a coating of rust and disrepair – before the guys at Tim’s spent weeks transforming her into the vibrant pink truck you see today.

“We actually mixed our own color of paint for it. Lady Luck pink and painted everything on it,” said Matthew Ballor of Tim’s Towing.

The inspiration came from Ballor’s grandmother. She battled and survived breast cancer before losing her life to a different cancer later on.

“She went through the whole fight. She was a tough lady. She’d love it. She’d probably want to take a ride in it,” Ballor said.

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month, 10 percent of the proceeds from every call Lady Luck goes on will be donated to Making Strides for Breast Cancer.

It’s an effort close to driver Darabos’ heart, too. “I have family that have survived and lost breast cancer, so it kind of relates to me also,” he said.

“Once we bring it out there you just hear all these stories how it affected their families. Even themselves just hearing their stories, you’d like to think it helps a customer,” Ballor said.

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The traffic case of the driver of a sod truck involved in the fatal school bus accident on March 26 is scheduled to go before a county judge at 1:30 p.m. Monday at the St. Lucie County Courthouse.The bus driver, Albert Hazen, of Port St. Lucie, was cited for being at fault in the accident. Hazen was fined $1,000 and his license was suspended for six months for failing to yield while making a left turn onto Midway Road, from Okeechobee Road.As he turned, the sod truck hit the school bus.

The Florida Highway Patrol wrote up truck driver Charles Cooper, 24, of Virginia, for technical violations: not properly filing out a state-required trip travel log. And the truck brakes needed adjustment, according to an FHP accident report. However the report said that didn’t contribute to the collision.Cooper’s case goes before County Judge Philip Yacucci. Cooper is represented by a private attorney.The parents of a student killed in the accident, Aaron Beauchamp, have filed a lawsuit against Cooper and the company he worked for, Cypress Truck Lines.

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The small group of trucking companies that agitated for mandatory electronic onboard recorders in the recent highway bill is on a mission to apply the same laser focus to a half-dozen additional safety initiatives, including mandatory speed limiters and improvements to drug and alcohol testing.
“I didn’t feel that there was any other issue, ever, probably within my lifetime in trucking, that was more important to get done and get done as soon as possible than to get an EOBR mandate,” said Steve Williams, chairman of the eight-member Alliance for Driver Safety & Security, known for short as The Trucking Alliance.Williams, chairman and CEO of Arkansas-based truckload carrier Maverick Transportation, helped launch the group in 2010 for the sole purpose of getting Congress to pass the mandate. The alliance was motivated not just by their shared commitment to the mandate, but also by frustration with the regular order of trucking business on Capitol Hill, which they found too slow and tenuous.Now that recorders are the law – the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has one year to finish the rule and three years to put it into effect – the alliance is doubling down.

Its agenda for the next two-year congressional cycle is to promote hair testing for drugs, creation of a drug and alcohol clearinghouse, mandatory speed limiters, higher financial requirements for would-be truckers and consideration of alternative compliance methods for determining safety fitness.None of these issues is new. Some of them already have been proposed as rules. And all are on the safety agenda of the American Trucking Associations.But the Alliance intends to push them using a new business model for truck lobbying, a model created out of impatience with the style of representation that ATA brings to Washington.

ATA is a federation of state trucking associations and operating groups such as the Truckload Carriers Association, as well as its trucking company members. The policy agenda that ATA’s professional staff carries to Congress and the regulatory agencies is shaped in a committee process that reflects the interests of the broad-based federation.Williams, a former chairman of ATA and current chair of the association’s research arm, the American Transportation Research Institute, was not satisfied with how onboard recorders fared in this process.
“ATA has to lobby a laundry list of issues that are collectively important to everyone but have different levels of importance to different factions within the industry,” he said.

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A full-time truck driver at the port, Mark Whetstine, said the number of trucking jobs being counted at the port is seriously inflated.Port executives claimed 1,363 trucking jobs before Hurricane Katrina, in an action plan submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for grant money being used to create jobs. Trucking jobs were included under the category “others” in the port’s post-Katrina job numbers. The port listed 812 jobs under “others.”

The most recent job numbers lump in truckers with vendors, with a total of 602 jobs listed in that category Whetstine estimates 10 to 15 trucks work the port daily, with other truck drivers in and out for shorter periods of time. Most of those drivers do not live on the Coast, Whetstine said, or even in Mississippi. If they were not hauling cheese from Gulfport to New Orleans, they would be hauling some other load for one of the big, out-of-state trucking firms that do business at the port.
“What do they consider a trucking job?” he said. “That’s the thing.”

Only a few of the trucking companies that work out of the port are based in Mississippi.Colonial Freight Systems, a Gulfport company, has 25 to 30 drivers who serve the port. “That’s our bread and butter,” said Colonial agent Susan McBride. She said eight of her drivers live in one of the six Coastal counties, and the others are scattered along the route.Fayard Fast Freight, also based in Gulfport, has 10 to 15 drivers who work locally, including at the port, transportation director Jerry Talton said.

He said two to three drivers a day usually work a full day at the port, depending on whether a ship is docked.If the port plans to count hundreds of truck-driving jobs as part of the total jobs its expanded West Pier will create, there could be a problem.According to HUD, out-of-state truckers would not meet the economic-benefit requirements, tied to the federal funding, for job creation on the Coast.

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Boston Police officers arrested a North Attleboro man in Dorchester Saturday night on drunk driving charges, after the man sprayed cologne into his mouth, presumably to cover up the smell of alcohol.

A man driving a gray vehicle struck a parked Boston Water and Sewer dump truck just before 8:30 p.m. Saturday night near the intersection of Dudley and Belden streets, police said. The truck driver went to the vehicle to get the driver’s information, but the driver fell asleep during the conversation, according to police reports.At one point, the man attempted to drive away, but was unable to leave because of the damage to his car, police said.

The truck driver told officers that he saw the man spray cologne into his mouth, presumably to mask the smell of alcohol. When Boston Police arrived, officers also saw the man spraying cologne on his body, according to a report.Officers said that in addition to bloodshot eyes and a lack of balance, the man’s breath smelled like alcohol. Officers arrested Hoi Ngo, 40, on charges of operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol.

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