This load was far more problematic than any with which I have been involved, and apparently the problems began LONG before I got involved.  They began moving this load back in September from Torrance, CA, through the state of Arizona.

I first got involved around the first of November when the dispatcher called to ask me to perform a route survey for this load.  I was in Las Vegas at the time, having just dropped a load there.

Typically, when I do a route survey, I make personal contact with the various utilities along the route.  That is time-consuming, so my rates reflect that.  It involves stopping and getting pole numbers, circuit numbers, etc., and then researching to find out who owns the utilities.  Then, I contact the line supervisor or operations manager for each utility, and if possible, meet nose-to-nose with that person.  If I believe we will need traffic control help while going through various communities, I personally contact the appropriate law enforcement agency.  During this process, I develop a contact list in the order we will need to call them.

The dispatcher asked me if I would give her a break if I let her do all the utility contacts.  She assured me that she would deal with them and they would know where all of their low road crossings were located.  Not having to do all that I normally do would have cut the time required to do this survey by half.  Since the load already was sitting because of the lack of NM permit, I was willing to accept her offer of help.  LITTLE DID I KNOW!  That will be the recurring theme of this blog.

On the first and second days of the survey, I broke my pole.  That should have been adequate warning to me.  After repairing my pole, I completed the survey and submitted it to the trucking company.  Later, they called and wanted me to research another potential route that involved 75 miles of dirt, rock and gravel road.  If it had worked out, it would have saved about 500 miles for the trucking company.  It took me five hours and two rear tires to survey that route, only to learn that it wouldn’t work because there were about a dozen cattleguards that were about 8 inches too narrow for the load.  I saw only three vehicles during that five hour period.

Days later, the permitting company called me and wanted me to run the route again, marking every low wire, about how high it was, and what type of wire (fiberoptic, telephone, power, etc.).  They said THEY would use that information to contact the various utilities along the way.  I did as they requested at my own expense, since I should have done it in the first place.  Unfortunately for me, I had relied upon the dispatcher to take care of that side of the survey.

Throughout this process, the dispatcher was contacting the utilities she could identify along our route, seeking letters of approval for the route from them.  In one specific case, a large telephone company responded in writing that they had no overhead wires along our route and there would be no problem.  I immediately saw that was erroneous and contacted the company representative myself with specific information.  After he went out and reviewed our route in person, he called me back to say that there was one particular fiberoptics line that was already as high as he could move it, and it was too tight to be lifted three feet by our bucket trucks.  That meant I had to review another route around that section of road.

Finally, we got our permit, letters of approval and a private bucket truck and began our move on December 3…one whole day.  On the second day, the lineman for the power company showed up to let us know that there was NO WAY we could travel the approved route because of multiple high voltage low wires.  So, we spent the entire day looking for a new way to get around El Paso.  Ultimately we had to have the El Paso police department shut down four miles of a four lane divided highway so we could get through El Paso.

On day three, we moved along quite well, until we neared the Ruidoso, NM, area.  About ten miles from Ruidoso, the head of the NM DOT permit office called me personally and said there was NO WAY we were going to get through Ruidoso, and to get the load to the nearest safe place and shut down.  Remember that we already had a permit approved by her office.  She informed me that we could not go through Ruidoso, despite the permit, because we had completely missed notifying a major telephone provider.  They had four low and tight fiberoptic lines that they would have had to cut to get us through on that day.  The director of the state permit office said that I needed to perform a route survey for a new route around Ruidoso and to request a new permit.  That process took another seven days and numerous phone calls on my part to work out varioius problems.

In the meantime, the trucking company repowered the load.  In other words, they replaced the initial driver with another one because he had lost his wallet, including CDL, medical card, fuel card, cash in various currencies, and etc.  The new driver had brought along his own escort.  Somehow, the state permit office thought I was going to be pulled from the load, and they were going to refuse to let the load move without either me, or a new route survey.  We got all that worked out and moved the following day with two high pole escorts.  We also picked up a new rear escort, an executive with the shipping company.

After that, we moved along fairly well.  I ran in front with the two bucket trucks (the executive ordered a second one for us).  When I hit a low wire, I stopped and one or both of the bucket trucks would pull up under the wire to lift it.  The second high pole came forward and stopped under the wire to let the bucket truck know how far up they needed to lift it, while I moved on to the next low wire.  We repeated that process for about 1400 miles.  Throughout this process, I was on the phone trying to identify the next utility company (primarily power companies) and notify them that we would need their help.  I also was calling the next community or political entity (county sheriff’s office or city police) to alert them that we would be coming through their area and would be having a negative impact on traffic.  It was a slow process.  We were averaging about 140 miles per day, and taking about ten hours to do that.  Do the math:  we were averaging about 14 mph.

Finally with the help of an outstanding Houston police motorcycle escort team, we delivered the load shipside at a Houston port late on December 16th.

As a result of this experience, I will NEVER EVER allow the customer to do the utility contacts.  Under about 18 feet, there are few problems, but for loads higher than 18 feet, prior coordination is critical!  I have found that if I give the utility companies adequate advance notice, they generally do not charge the trucking company to move their wires.  After all, it is in their interest that we notify them and involve them in the process.  That way, they do not suffer damage to their equipment by some company that sneaks through with an OD load, tears down wires and then disappears down the highway.  For those companies that DO charge, that is a reasonable expense of moving the load that the trucking company should expect to pay.

Here are the other problems we encountered:  there is no single source of information for identifying the above ground utilities that might be impacted by our load route.  There are “one call” centers in all the states, but their systems are not set  up to handle requests for above ground utilities.  For one to issue a list of utilities, their systems apparently automatically send out notices to every single utility, underground as well as above ground.  The end result is that we wind up getting letters of approval from everyone from private pipeline companies to city water departments and beyond.  During our second permit request in NM, the permit office abruptly changed the rules and REQUIRED us to go through the “one call center”.  I think they may have backed off of that requirement for the time being.

We also encountered utilitiy companies, and even some political entities (such as the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation), who approved our routes without actually traveling or at least specifically reviewing the requested routes.  The Mescalero reservation very quickly found us a new and better route through their area.  As I mentioned before, in some cases, the “worker bee”, that linesman who had to escort us, let us know that we couldn’t use those routes, despite letters of approval and permits.  That is the problem when dealing with the desk drivers and not directly with the “boots on the ground”.

I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this experience, and will apply them to all future route surveys for high loads.

Actually I am thankful for the early stop.  It gave me a chance to catch up on my sleep.  Last night, I got about an hour and a half of sleep.  That gets harder as I get older.  There was a time when I went 44 hours without sleep during a war exercise in Germany.  I can’t do those marathons these days.

Today I also heard that the load that was scheduled to load this week may not load.  I did a route survey for this load last week.  It is 20′ 6″ high and 15′ 3″ wide.  It was supposed to have been loaded in Houston last Friday.  Now, there is a question whether it will go this week or not.  If it is delayed into next week,then I’ve got a scheduling conflict.  I am committed on an other OD load for which I also did a route survey last. Somehow it all will work out.

Today I completed one route survey and began another one.  My second survey of the day is for the exact same load that I took through a couple of weeks ago…but I thought I would find a shortcut and save my customer about 100 miles.  I got three quarters of the way through the shortcut when I encountered an overpass that is five inches too low.

Two years ago, I measured that overpass and it was 2 inches higher than my load for this new survey, so I thought for sure I could get my load through.  WRONG!!  Apparently, at some point over the past 2 years, someone repaved the road underneath that overpass.  That’s the only logical explanation I can come up with.  SURELY I measured it accurately 2 years ago, so that couldn’t be it.  There is an important point here, for those of you just learning to perform route surveys:  NEVER EVER simply do a book survey because you think you know your route “like the back of your hand”.  Stuff happens!  Things change!  There is just too much at stake to do a so-called “book” survey.  People get hurt and loads get destroyed and overpasses or bridges get damaged when you do things like that…not to mention HUGE claims against your liability insurance.  Every time I have tried to do a “book” survey, I got caught at it, and that is embarrassing.

Anyway, I had to backtrack about 100 miles and start over on my second survey.  That puts me about a half day behind where I wanted to be by now.  Hopefully I will finish it up on Friday.

I dodged a big weather bullet last night.  As I got into Tucumcari last night, a serious storm was coming through town.  I pulled into a parking lot and waited for about 20 minutes until things cleared up.  I never saw anything, so I had dinner, went to my room and went to bed.  This morning, I learned that  a tornado apparently had passed over me and struck a house not even a half mile from where I had parked.  (Someone up there likes me.  Who knows why?)

I am in Bernalillo, NM, tonight.

After leaving that load, I came back to Albuquerque to perform a route survey for a 23 foot wide load going into Colorado on US 285.  I thought it would be relatively easy, but I found that several different construction sites in the Santa Fe area that nixed that idea.  So, I’ve had to be creative.  I will finish up that survey tomorrow and then return to Gallup to resume that load.

I’ve been asked to come up with a chase escort for this load to Nevada.  Getting a decent escort for the price they want to pay is not easy.  We all are between a rock and a hard spot.  The big trucking companies set the rates which they will pay, acknowledging that fuel prices have gone up dramatically but they are holding their rates.  It is understandable.  With the economy wilting the way it is, shippers know they can demand cheap rates because the companies need the business.  The same is with us:  the trucking companies know we need the business, so they hold the prices artificially low.  This makes it difficult for small pilot car companies and newly established ones to survive.

The best we can do is to try to minimize our costs, maximize our profits, and do what we can to stay in business at reasonble, profitable rates.  There is a danger in overpricing ourselves out of the market.  One trucking company instructed their pilot car brokers to not hire escorts out of our area because our rates are more than they want to pay.  It is foolish economy.  I know of one load where the high pole escort could not get certified in NM and the chase almost didn’t get certified.  The end results was that the load was delayed for more than four hours until a replacement high pole escort could get to the load…and the load will be a day late, as a result.