Star-Banner (Ocala, Florida); Sunday, October 21, 2007

HEADLINE: In drive for profits, trucking company routinely puts overweight rigs on the road

Byline: Fred Hiers

OCALA - Vivian Bernard wasn't surprised when one of the tires under his tractor-trailer finally blew. 

Working for Benton Express Inc.'s Ocala terminal, his company-owned truck was often over its legal weight coming back to Ocala, barreling down Interstate 75.

He said he complained to his bosses about the weight problem, about the truck being harder to handle because of the extra freight, about the danger to himself and other motorists. But in the end, he said, they didn't care. Besides, he needed the job, so he kept quiet and kept driving.

"When you have too much weight on a tire it sticks out like a fat man's belly," Bernard said about the blow-out three years ago. "You just hope you don't roll over. 

"The tire blowing out sounds like a gun going off. It's like a firecracker in a tomato. It goes everyplace."

Luckily, no one was injured when the tire blew and Bernard drove his limping truck back to the Ocala terminal on Northwest Third Place with one less tire. He was still carrying all his freight on board. 

Bernard told the Star-Banner that while working for Benton between 2003 and 2005, he made one or two trips between Ocala and Gainesville each week and his truck was overweight on almost every run. And because there are no truck weigh stations between the two cities, he said he was never caught.

But it wasn't just Bernard's truck that was coming back to Ocala from Benton's favorite Gainesville customer, Specialty Construction Brands, weighing more than the law allows. Other Benton trucks were often loaded to the brim and operating over the 80,000 pound limit on highways between Gainesville and Ocala. Employees say that's been going on at least since 2003. 

A Star-Banner examination of bills of lading and state Department of Transportation records, as well as interviews with drivers, managers and other Benton employees, revealed that the company has a track record of violations. The newspaper found:

* The company's drivers were cited 83 times in the past four years for driving overweight trucks in Florida.

* The Atlanta-based company has a history of stacking as much freight as its Ocala trucks could bear for Specialty Construction of Gainesville. Specialty Construction manufactures construction materials and ships them to cities throughout Florida.

* Benton kept bills of lading intended to represent separate loads on trips for Specialty Construction, but that were really single shipments that sometimes far exceeded the legal weight limit. The Star-Banner could not determine whether Benton exceeded weight limits for any of its other clients.

* Even when Benton trucks were caught breaking the law, the fines were modest compared to the profits Benton earned by hauling the extra freight, due in part to a state fine formula that hasn't been updated since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.

But the Star-Banner also found something else - Benton is hardly an exception in the trucking industry, where companies routinely ignore the law by hauling thousands of pounds of freight more than they should. In fact, several other trucking companies racked up more overweight citations in Florida last year than Benton has in the past four years, including Cypress Truck Lines Inc., Allied Systems LTD, Sysco Food Services, Southeastern Freight Lines Inc., and HMT Company Inc.

It's just that in Benton's case, the company left a paper trail of its violations and some of its employees finally had enough and came forward.

FAT LOADS

Benton's bills of lading from Gainesville's Specialty Construction show that at least two years after Bernard left Benton in 2005, the company was still routinely overloading its trucks. Under Florida law, the combined weight of the tractor-trailer and its freight cannot exceed 80,000 pounds. Most tractor-trailers weigh about 30,000 pounds empty.

Company records show that the Ocala terminal broke weight laws at least nine times during August and September, carrying anywhere from 2,825 pounds to 32,092 pounds more than allowed.

For example, company records showed that on Aug. 3, a single Benton truck picked up 26 pallets of building supplies from Specialty Construction, mostly cement compound, weighing 62,816 pounds. The driver hauled the freight back to Ocala, where most went to Jacksonville and the rest to Tallahassee.

Specialty Construction bills of lading showed that even Benton's Ocala terminal manager, Sam Warren, drove overweight loads. During the two months of the newspaper's investigation, bills of lading showed that Warren twice drove overweight shipments.

Former Benton driver Bernard said he and other company drivers hauling Specialty Construction cargo didn't worry much about getting caught, because the routes they used between the two cities, namely Interstate 75 and U.S. 441, didn't have fixed weigh stations. The only risk they ran of getting caught was if FDOT officers stopped them and weighed their trucks using the agency's portable scales. He said that never happened to him in the two years he worked for Benton.

Bernard no longer works for the company. He left after a Workers Compensation dispute in 2005.

It wasn't just luck that Bernard was never stopped and weighed, though.

There are only about 200 FDOT law enforcement inspectors combing the roads, stopping trucks and weighing them throughout Florida.

That's about one inspector per county per eight-hour shift.

Former Benton employees who worked at the company's Ocala terminal said Benton violated the law because it meant more money in the firm's coffers.

Jon Baglieri worked for Benton's Ocala terminal unloading its trucks. He said it was no secret that trucks coming back from Gainesville were overweight.

"I knew what the deal was," Baglieri said of the trucks hauling Specialty Construction freight. "Everybody knew."

Benton's willingness to haul extra freight for Specialty Construction gave the trucking company a competitive edge, he said.

That's because while another trucking firm might have used two trucks to carry the construction company's heavy shipments, Benton was doing the job with one truck. As a result, Benton was cutting down on expenses and boosting profits.

Baglieri said he routinely saw his company's trucks arriving at the docks with too much weight.

"It's a risk the company's willing to take," he said. "They do it because they can send one less driver out."

Just a few hours after the Star-Banner met with Benton officials in September about its violations, the trucking company fired Baglieri.

Baglieri says Benton gave him his walking papers because it suspected that he had leaked information about the company.

But Baglieri wasn't the only employees who saw problems.

Donna Corbin worked for Benton for 1 years. She said her stint there was long enough to learn that Benton didn't think much of weight restrictions when it came to the Ocala/Gainesville route. She was the Ocala terminal's dispatcher and said she saw Benton flaunting the weight laws soon after starting the job.

"After I called Specialty Construction one time to see if they would take some of the weight off, Sam [Warren], the terminal manager, went ballistic," Corbin said. "He said for me to get over it. He said for me to just send the trucks."

"It was always like that. The trucks were always overweight and nothing was ever done about it," she said.

Benton also fired Corbin earlier this summer. She said it was because she wouldn't keep quiet about the weight violations.

BENTON RESPONDS

When the Star-Banner met with Benton in September, the company's executives admitted they had broken Florida's weight laws but said they didn't learn of the violations until the newspaper contacted them.

The company has eight terminals in Florida and a total of 23 terminals in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina and parts of Alabama.

Benton vice president Boyd "Don" Hammonds said he began his own investigation into the violations after the newspaper asked to meet to discuss weight violation complaints.

"I'd like to thank the informant that called you folks," Hammonds said at the Sept. 25 interview with the Star-Banner. "Without that happening and without the Star [Banner] calling Sam and Sam calling me, the general office would have no knowledge of this."

Hammonds said he didn't know how long Ocala's terminal was running overweight, but as soon as corporate headquarters in Atlanta got involved, it contacted Specialty Construction about the issue and the two companies were cooperating to make sure it wouldn't happen anymore.

Warren said he also didn't know anything about the violations until the Star-Banner contacted him and that's when he began his own investigation into the issue, too.

When asked how he didn't know of the violations, despite being the terminal's greatest offender of the weight law, Hammonds interrupted the interview, saying, "Sam, you don't have to answer that. We have admitted this has occurred. What else do you want?

"It doesn't make any difference why, when or how long. It doesn't make any difference why this particular incident occurred," Hammonds said. "The fact is the problem has been corrected and nothing more needs to be said about it."

Benton senior vice president, Benny Cordero, telephoned the Star-Banner several days after the meeting to express his concern.

He said a negative story about his trucking company could cause Benton to lose customers. When asked about the company's weight violations, Cordero instead continued to express his concern about the Star-Banner having some of the company's bills of lading and that competing trucking companies could use the documents to snatch some of Benton's customers away.

While Benton's Ocala terminal did overload many of its trucks, the Star-Banner learned that the company, nationwide, had a relatively good safety record.

Benton's Gainesville customer, whose freight was at the center of this story, said the trucking company's violations were a surprise to them.

Specialty Construction facilities manager Charles Schilie said he didn't know about Benton overloading its trucks with his freight.

Schilie said his company paid Benton to ship its freight and paid little, if any, attention to the number of trucks the company used to do the job. Specialty Construction employees simply loaded Benton trucks when they arrived, he said, and gave bills of lading to the drivers.

"It wasn't our job to weigh the trucks," Schilie said. "We've been relying on Benton to ensure the weight."

A WIDESPREAD PROBLEM

While driving overloaded trucks was a common practice at Benton, the company is hardly an exception in that respect. In fact, the company is part of a much bigger, national problem.

According to a study presented at the federal Transportation Research Board's annual meeting in 2006, as much as 30 percent of all tractor-trailer rigs and dump trucks on local, state and federal highways are overloaded.

In Florida, the number of overweight trucks is so great because the state has failed to adequately oversee the trucking business, said John Lannen, executive director for the not-for-profit Truck Safety Coalition. Lannen believes the problem is threefold: 

* FDOT, the agency whose job it is to enforce the state's weight limits, is understaffed.

* The system of fines meant to punish violators is obsolete and has no real teeth.

* And there doesn't appear to be much political will to get tough on lawbreakers behind the wheels of trucks.

The end result, said Lannen, is that other motorists are at risk.

Florida's failure leaves drivers on Interstate 75, State Road 441 and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue having to play a game of Russian roulette when there's a tractor-trailer or dump truck nearby.

And with that many overweight vehicles, every so often in the motorist's deadly game with big trucks, somebody dies.

Heavier trucks also take a heavier toll on roads and bridges.

That's because overweight trucks wear down roads and bridges at least twice as fast as trucks obeying the law, making infrastructure unsafe for other motorists. They are also more likely to be in accidents because they are prone to rollovers and need much more time and distance to stop, said Lannen and other transportation experts.

And even when overweight trucks are caught, most have to be let go.

As long as an overweight truck is less than 6,000 pounds overweight, FDOT can fine the trucking company, but Florida law says they have to let the truck continue on its way with its overweight load. Only if the truck is more than 6,000 pounds over the legal limit can the driver be sidelined and forced to unload his freight.

And as long as trucking companies pay their fines, there's no law on Florida's books to yank away their license to operate, regardless of how many times they're caught.

To see if Benton's driving record compared to other trucking operations in Florida, the Star-Banner examined two other transport companies selected at random.

Conway Transportation Service, and its subsidiary transport divisions, for example, were issued 113 citations in Florida since 2003, of which 101 were for weight violations. Conway executives would not comment for this story.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDOT issued Roehl Transport Inc. 25 citations. Nine were for weight violations.

Roehl vice president for safety, John Spiron, said he could not comment about his company's citations without reviewing them.

But Spiron said he wasn't surprised by the newspaper's findings. That's because he used to be a traffic law enforcement officer outside Dallas and once made his living stopping and weighing trucks during the 1980s.

Asked during a telephone interview what percentage of dump trucks he stopped were overweight, Spiron laughed and replied, "almost all."

Asked how many tractor-trailers he stopped were overweight, he said between 10 and 20 percent.

"The trucking industry seems to have a very different perspective on safety, relative to other industries," he said. "Every industry has its culture and that's just the trucking industry, and there's no sense of urgency. There's no sense of urgency to change, because they don't feel the pain when they break the law."

Florida, like most other states, doesn't put enough trucking inspectors on the road and its fines are inadequate, he said.

"I know the trucking industry is a powerful industry, but at some point I'd think it would be just embarrassing to the Legislature," Lannen said. "I just don't get it."