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Fast-growing county grapples with unsafe trucks

With More Trucks on Roads, County Steps Up Efforts to Catch Unsafe Rigs

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 15, 2006; Page LZ01

A white sun rose over the traffic jam on Route 9 in Hillsboro as the tractor-trailer was directed to a patch of roadside gravel. There, Chris Rizzo and his crew were ready to give it a once-over. Brakes, suspension, steering and weight -- the four-man truck-safety inspection team would check it all.

If recent history was any indication, the truck had better than a 1-in-3 chance of being sidelined for the day.
Rizzo, a Loudoun County sheriff's deputy, peered into a camcorder-like contraption pointed toward the truck's wheels. Called a thermal imager, it would tell him the condition of the brakes, the source of most violations: A white glow meant good. No glow meant bad.

"They've got a real good glow to them," Rizzo said.

The driver got good news: One rear brake light was out and a thick chain was poorly secured on the exposed truck bed, but he would get off with a warning. Two trucks that followed would not.

In fast-growing Loudoun County, one of the most vexing law enforcement problems is not murder, graft or carjacking.

It is trucks.

As new buildings sprout, speeding cement trucks and overburdened semis follow. On average, Rizzo said, at least 35 percent of trucks inspected at checkpoints by Loudoun deputies are too dangerous to be allowed to go farther.

Violations can have serious consequences. Unsecured loads fall off. Overweight trucks rip up roads. And failing brakes cause trucks to plow into other vehicles, which can be particularly deadly. According to Rizzo, a car-on-car collision has about a 1-in-1,200 chance of being fatal. A truck-on-car collision raises those odds to 1 in 9.

In recent weeks, at least four crashes have been caused by trucks with bad brakes, and all sent motorists to the hospital, Rizzo said.

"They all had several defects," he said of the trucks. "Any one of [the accidents] could have been a fatality."

The Sheriff's Office has stepped up enforcement to deal with the problem. Ten years ago, it had no full-time truck inspectors. Last year, it had two. This year, it has four. "We could probably keep 10 people busy," Rizzo said.

When the inspectors are not at checkpoints, they are on the lookout for violations. And there are many: Rizzo said that up to 60 percent of the trucks he stops are taken out of service, which means that unless the driver makes fixes on the spot, the truck must be towed.

After 16 years of truck inspections -- eight in Fairfax County -- Rizzo speaks of violations in understatements.

I've gotten some pretty good overweights here," he said at the Hillsboro checkpoint before mentioning a truck recently slapped with a $5,000 fine for being 17,000 pounds overweight. "They do quite a bit of damage to the roads," he said, adding that a truck that is 15,000 pounds overweight causes the same wear and tear as will be caused by 122,000 smaller vehicles such as cars.

But local officials talk about trucks in superlative terms. Hillsboro Mayor Roger L. Vance, who is trying to get trucks banned in town, has spoken of a "real fear" of trucks. Loudoun Supervisor Stephen J. Snow (R-Dulles) said he has "literally been scared for my life" by trucks crowding him out of a lane. Loudoun Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson has characterized speeding by deadline-driven truckers as "a nightmare."

Rizzo said the percentage of trucks with violations has remained steady since he began inspections in Loudoun. But the number of trucks has exploded, while the number of roads has not.

Most complaints involve country roads now used as construction thoroughfares, roads that "never were designed to have these big 20-, 25-ton trucks going 50, 60 miles an hour," Snow said.

One of those is Gum Spring Road in Arcola, where, in August, 17 of 30 trucks inspected at a checkpoint just south of Route 50 were taken out of service.

In a nearby neighborhood of sparkling townhouses, auto mechanic John Vizzato, 32, spoke of baseball-size stones littering the road, the wake of overloaded trucks. "If you're trying to go somewhere, you're always sitting behind a truck," he said.

Local officials are looking for solutions beyond enforcement or new roads -- a touchy issue in Loudoun. One idea, said Supervisor Jim Clem (R-Leesburg), is stiffening fines, which currently can be as high as $5,000 for a second offense. Snow has proposed reducing speed limits in some areas.

Officials in Hillsboro, where the two-lane Route 9 is the tiny town's main street, are taking a more aggressive approach: They're seeking a state approval of a truck ban.

"A tanker truck coming through this town, getting out of control and . . . causing an explosion would be a catastrophe," Vance said. "Knowing that so many of these trucks are unsafe . . . it just really heightens the issue for us."

On the shoulder of Route 9, Gary Howell popped the yellow hood of his dump truck and turned his steering wheel left and right as a deputy instructed.

"I tell 'em, I don't mind the . . . checks, because they might find something I missed," Howell said, a cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth as he spoke out of the other. "It's my butt driving this truck."

Inspector Bart Foster rounded the nose of the vehicle and gave Howell the all-clear. "Sir, you're good to go."

Four of four had passed that morning's tests. But later that morning, Rizzo said, two trucks did not. That afternoon, the inspection squad put out of service nine of 16 trucks inspected on nearby Hillsboro Road.

Over in Arcola, Heather Dajani, who works at the Gateway Community Church office, said she figures the area will face this issue for only a few more years -- by then, development will be maxed out and the trucks will have moved on.

Outside the church office, that era seemed far off. Backhoes and bulldozers lined the roads. A sign propped outside a stone company on Route 50 advertised jobs for those with commercial driver's licenses -- the kind of license needed to operate a dump truck or tractor-trailer.

Kevin MacLeod, a doctoral student who lives in a nearby townhouse, took a broad view. "That's the price of progress," he said.