Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/769491
VOICES CHANNEL 19 4 | Overdrive | January 2017 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' CHANNEL 19 BLOG at OverdriveOnline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. Carrier consultant Andy Blair's story in the Commercial Ve- hicle Safety Alliance's Guardian quarterly publication last fall discussed his use of the out-of-service cri- teria handbook that CVSA publishes. Blair, a York, Pa.- based former police offi cer and certifi ed inspector, argues that picking up a copy could be $45 well spent ($35 for CVSA members). In any OOS violation you receive, com- pare the associated inspection report to the book itself, he says. Depending on the circumstances, you could fi nd a basis for challenging the violation through the Federal Motor Car- rier Safety Admin- istration's DataQs system and getting it removed from the company record. Blair argues the book's much easier to use than the big green book of regula- tions. As he writes in the Guardian, as an offi cer he "used the OOS criteria hand- book much more than the general reg- ulations." The CVSA book's got "diagrams, photos, guides" and more, while the big green book looks and reads "like an old phone book." The OOS handbook "also includes the 49 CFR reference [for any OOS condition], and should you need to check further into the regulations, you can easily at least locate the right chap- ter," Blair writes. Last time I wrote about the OOS book, on the occa- sion of 2016 updates, wisecracks came swiftly. "So a pigtail coming out is now an OOS violation for lights," Kurt Keilhofer wrote. "Does this mean when most of the letters in the OPEN or CLOSED sign for the scale are not working, the scale can be put OOS until it is repaired?" If only. More seriously, Allan Mc- Cullough noted that, as has been argued for years by others, the electronic version of the book ought to be free, particularly if CVSA is really "concerned about safety." Yote Anders suggested a diff erent source of revenue, one that also might eliminate a lot of equipment violations: "Why don't they get rid of some DOT offi cers and use the money to fi x the roads?" But if the price of a CVSA book saves you once from an OOS violation, it might well have re- turned its investment, if not the downtime/ expense incurred in the moment of inspection. CVSA typically makes pub- lic its annual updates, so annotations to the print version for reference are possible without buying a new copy. Blair says he's open to questions about violations. Write him at: Dotinspector@ gmail.com. SHOULD OUT-OF-SERVICE CRITERIA BOOK BE FREE? … you might do well to keep it in the original container, if only to avoid it being mistaken for some- thing illicit. According to Arkansas' KATV, military-haul team Gale Griffi n and Wendell Harvey (a former police offi cer in Fort Wayne, Ind.) were pulled in for a routine check at the gates into Fort Chaff ee, Ark., when personnel identifi ed bags of white powder they suspected for cocaine. It was just baking soda, which Griffi n buys in bulk, given she uses the versatile substance "for everything," she told the reporters. Law enforcement around the country use a cheap ($2, reportedly) quick-ID kit to test substances for narcotics. Multiple rounds of the quick-ID kits used in this case showed positive results. Griffi n and Harvey then spent the better part of the summer (two months in total) in jail, losing their truck and their work and making for a diffi cult bounce-back. When more extensive tests fi nally were done, they were released. It took another couple of months to get their truck back from an Arkansas impound. Catch KATV's broad- cast, a false-positive cautionary tale that should be heeded by truckers (and any offi cers reading, too), via the Nov. 28 post. If you carry baking soda on the truck … To comment on the ques- tion in this story's title, look up the Dec. 3 post to the Channel 19 blog. This is not a box of cocaine.