Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/947211
36 | Overdrive | March 2018 NOT SO CALM BEFORE THE ELD STORM of a stiff approach to mandate enforce- ment. "April 1 was very reasonable. Time to comply." As late as Jan. 22 in the period shown on the accompanying chart, Georgia-based owner-operator Robert Whittington, leased to York, South Carolina-based Epling Transportation, ran into a problem. He was dinged for not having an ELD during a Level 3 credentials inspection at an Interstate 95 scale in Darien, Georgia. While Whittington's paper logs were in order and he was not placed out of service, the violation shown on the inspection report was 395.8(a), not the more lenient 395.22(a) as requested by FMCSA. The most outrageous part was that Whittington's 2001 Freightliner Century was powered by an ELD-exempt 1995- built Detroit Series 60 engine. The week after the incident, Lee Epling, owner of the three-truck all- owner-operator fleet, was hauling flatbed freight and "stopped at the Ringgold [Georgia] scale on I-75 coming out of Tennessee." Epling asked the scalemas- ter about training for Georgia troopers on how to determine whether a truck was ELD-exempt or not, based on the engine year. "They had a four-day conference in Georgia" prior to the mandate going into effect, Epling says he was told. The officer "even went out to his car and pulled the manuals out and handed them to me. Now, unlike the regs in the little green book [the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations], those man- uals were written in plain English." They told him the trooper who'd issued the ELD violation to owner-oper- ator Whittington should have allowed him to "pop the hood on the truck" to get a look at the engine plate, where he clearly would have seen stamped a 1995 manufacture date. "Even if he couldn't make the deter- mination on-site during the inspection," the manual clearly spelled out that the determination would need to be made by contacting company ownership for documentation, all of which squares with procedures FMCSA and state rep- resentatives laid out for Overdrive in the months before Dec. 18. "This guy did none of that," Epling says. The 395.8(a) violation and its 5-point non-OOS severity weight at press time was contributing to Epling Transportation's Hours of Service Compliance BASIC measure in the CSA SMS. The measure shot up from 0 for the last two years, with five driver inspections, to 1.25 with this sixth. For a three-truck fleet, that translates to a 48.9% score in the BASIC with just a single violation. That's below the inter- vention threshold, but Epling could risk a focused audit should any of his three units incur another hours violation. 180 170 160 150 140 130 120 110 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Federal MCMIS database ELD mandate enforcement begins. Data after this point less complete due to reporting delays. Owner-operator Robert Whittington, his truck powered by an ELD-exempt 1995 engine, is issued a 395.8(a) violation for not having a logbook at the I-95 scale in Darien, Georgia. January 2018 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 395.8(a) log violations 395.8(a) log violations December 2017 The volume of serious 395.8(a) log violations, which affect CSA scores, has increased follow- ing the Dec. 18 implementation of the electronic logging device mandate, when a lenient enforce- ment period was supposed to begin. FMCSA had requested that violations for no ELDs be encoded with a less-serious 49 CFR 395.22(a) violation, thereby not impacting carrier CSA scores during the pre-April 1 soft enforcement. The chart shows that in the two weeks before Dec. 18, 70.5 violations per day were written for 395.8(a). In the two weeks that followed, even with the reduced trucking and enforcement activ- ity associated with the holiday week, and less- than-complete reporting at yearend, 88.2 viola- tions were the average, a 25 percent increase. From Dec. 18 through Jan. 25, 2,842 violations were issued for 395.8(a) and 12,886 for 395.22(a). Many of the 395.8(a) violations undoubtedly were written for the same reason they were prior to the mandate: Carriers simply weren't keeping records of duty status. However, if you were using paper logs and incurred a 395.8(a) prior to April 1 simply for not having an ELD record, challenge it through the FMCSA DataQs process to remove it from carrier records, watchers say. Some lapse in soft enforcement of ELD violations