Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/989498
Voices 6 | Overdrive | June 2018 The Federal Motor Car- rier Safety Administration stressed in advance of the electronic logging device mandate that it expect- ed drivers to encounter circumstances reasonably beyond their control that would force them to record hours of service violations. Drivers were advised to log it like it happened, clearly annotating the log in the ELD to explain the viola- tion so that state inspectors could get the full picture. That advice, in the words of Overdrive reporting just after the ELD man- date's inception: Log it like it happened, annotate the log to describe the circumstances, and hope for leniency if it's questioned. Leniency was not on offer for owner-operator Tom Werner, running under the authority of small fleet Unlimited Express in Mo- lalla, Oregon, in a recent incident that probably wouldn't have happened on a paper log. He received an out-of-service hours vi- olation following an honest error he'd made with his e-log a few days earlier. Werner's not alone in vio- lations incurred due to the quirks of ELDs. A driver commenting under Wer- ner's story at OverdriveOn- line.com noted he'd recently "stopped in traffic, and the ELD changed automatically to on-duty not-driving." Unaware of the switch, the hauler ran a few hours, was stopped by police and received an hours violation for a false log. Werner had been stopped for speeding – 68 in a 60-mph zone – on a Thursday. He was south- bound on I-5 nearing a location he says is famous for patrolmen "hanging out down by the truck stop coming down off the mountain." It's not far from the last Oregon rest area before you get to the California border, where he was planning a stop. When the officer finished with the speeding ticket, he asked if Werner had an electronic log. The officer claimed to have never seen an e-log, so Werner, accus- tomed to emailing logs from his dash-mounted eRoad device directly to officers, offered a demonstration. "He gets on the running board," says Werner, who explained a few of the screens on the device. That included "the remarks area when you have an issue," where drivers input the kinds of annotations that FMCSA emphasized. Werner offered an exam- ple of that for the officer, looking back to the previ- ous Sunday. He'd gotten to Sacramento that evening, stopped to go off-duty and "was talking to another driver." Distracted, he neglect- ed to log off-duty for the 11 hours there, sleeping overnight for most of it. He showed the officer his annotation to that status, a remark that he'd made a simple mistake, and the lo- cation data that confirmed the remark by showing no truck movement. In retrospect, Werner notes, he could have better edited that status to reflect the reality of what hap- pened there, then annotat- ed the status with a remark to that effect. Monday morning, when he realized his mistake, he made a remark within the log that the 11 hours on-duty not-driving was in error, but he didn't edit the log itself. Thursday, as Werner explained the ELD to the officer, the officer got in the truck and nodded along. Then he got out and asked, "So, where do you want to stay?" As Werner tells it, "He'd decided he was going to shut me down. I said, 'Man, come on.' " Things turned for the worse. He'd emailed his full log to the officer, including the erroneous 11 hours from Sunday night to Monday morning. It therefore showed a cumula- tive 73 hours on-duty, three beyond his limit. "All I have to go on is your log," the officer kept repeating as Werner made his case for leniency. After a police escort back up I-5 to a nearby truck stop for his forced 10 hours out of service, the owner- operator told the officer, "I'm going to fight this. He said, 'What do you mean? I didn't give you a ticket' " for the log violation. "There's no reason for you to shut me down," So much for 'leniency' with ELD snafus Owner-operator Tom Werner shows his out-of-service order, issued because of a cumulative-limits violation. It resulted from an "honest mis- take," he says, made with his ELD and largely verified by the ELD.