About the Author:
Brett R. Aquila is a 15-year truck driving veteran of America's highways, logging over 1.5 million safe miles. He is trying to help new truck drivers to be successful in their trade, through a dose of reality. Please visit www.truckingtruth.com for more information
Let's talk about what exactly the truck driver is responsible for when it comes to hauling freight. To be on the safe side let's assume that the truck driver is responsible for absolutely everything unless I specifically say otherwise.
And I probably won't say otherwise.
A typical story you'll hear a truck driver tell after his truck has tipped over is, “I was going around the curve on the offramp and the load shifted causing the truck to tip.” And I believe every word of this story almost every time because that's exactly what usually happened, except they left out a couple of details....what they should have said was, “I was going too fast around the curve on the offramp and the load, that I said was loaded properly and was safe for travel, shifted causing the truck to tip.”
Couple of really important things to note here.
The first one simply relates to how fast a truck can go around a curve. In trucking, there's two ways to find out. One, you could hire an engineer and give them the numerical details involving weight, center of gravity height, turn radius, etc and a few simple calculations later you have the exact speed a specific truck can go around a particular curve.
The easier way is too just get in a truck and find out the “real world” way.
DON'T do this. NOT EVEN ONCE!
Often times when a truck tips over on an interstate highway ramp the driver knew when he took the exit that he was going way too fast but figured he'd find a way to get it slowed down really quickly. Misjudgments in a big rig can be really, really bad sometimes. Really bad.
Taking chances and making assumptions as a truck driver can be equally terrible. I realize that it's out of order to cover this topic right now but I don't care....nothing in the world is more important to any trucker than safety. There is no bad time to mention it.
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