Citations rise for violators of highway haul permits
JARED MILLER Star-Tribune capital bureau | Posted: Monday, October 29, 2007 12:00 am
CHEYENNE -- As the number of overweight trucks on Wyoming highways goes up, so does the number of truckers getting busted for illegally heavy loads.
The Wyoming Highway Patrol, which issued an average of nearly 740 overweight-load citations each year between 2002 and 2005, wrote 900 citations in 2006. The patrol had written 600 tickets by Oct. 15 of this year.
"We write them every week," said Highway Patrol spokesman Sgt. Stephen Townsend.
The culprits are a mixture of local and out-of-state drivers.
Some are ignorant of the laws, some ignore them, and others try to sneak loads so heavy they would never be legally permitted on state highways.
A common law-breaker is a rig company that tries to save time by moving an entire rig, rather than breaking it down into lighter pieces, Townsend said.
Such loads can weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds, and cause serious damage to the highway surface and subsurface.
Other truckers get into trouble by cheating a self-issuing permit system that asks drivers and companies to be on their honor.
The program allows drivers to weigh their own trucks, issue their own permits and turn in the paperwork to the state within 48 hours.
Brad Holyoak, owner of Hettinger Welding of Gillette, said his company routinely hauls overweight loads and uses the self-issuing program.
While it's possible to cheat the system, Holyoak said, it's not worth it. Companies caught breaking the law are stripped of self-issuing permits, which Holyoak said is critical to his business.
Without them, the company would have to coordinate every overweight load with the nearest port of entry, which is not always open during the company's 24-7 operation.
"The folks who have self-issuing permits I think are pretty dang good, just because you don't want to lose that privilege," Holyoak said.
Not everyone who receives an overweight load citation is trying to break the law, said Col. Sam Powell of the Highway Patrol.
"The trucking industry may be making a very good-faith effort to be legal, but when we get them on the scale and we bridge them out and we measure them, we find they have violations," Powell said. "And then you have the trucking companies that knowingly are overweight and just hope they don't get caught."
The Highway Patrol has a number of methods for identifying and capturing illegal loads.
Some state troopers carry portable scales in their vehicles, and can weigh and cite overweight trucks on the side of the road.
Townsend said troopers get good at picking out overweight trucks by looking at the bulge of the tires and the compression on the suspension.
"We deal with those all the time, every day," he said.
Another way to fight illegal loads is with "meat teams."
Composed of officers from ports of entry, meat teams take to the highways about once a month and use portable scales to target violators in different parts of the state.
"I'd like to think we've got a pretty good handle on controlling the overweight and oversize movements," Powell said. "But obviously we can't be everywhere at once, and some of those loads are going to go without our knowledge."
Drivers caught with illegal loads are sometimes made to offload them on the spot. Others are allowed to proceed but are issued citations and required to get the proper permits later.
The maximum penalty for violating an overweight-load permit is up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine, plus additional weight-based fines for extremely heavy loads.
Reach capital bureau reporter Jared Miller at (307) 632-1244 or at jared.miller@casperstartribune.net.