This news story originally provided by The Lexington Herald-Leader

April 2, 2005

Ky. crackdown on overweight trucks rolls on

U.S. 23 CHECKPOINT NETS VIOLATORS; BLITZ OF SPEEDING TICKETS IS PLANNED

By Lee Mueller
EASTERN KENTUCKY BUREAU

WITTENSVILLE - Waiting to be weighed, Lewis Fletcher was not a happy motorist.

"I don't like it," said Fletcher, 44, of Louisa, sitting in his idling 18-wheel tractor trailer on the side of U.S. 23 yesterday behind nine other loaded coal trucks.

Across the four-lane highway, however, a man driving a northbound Volkswagen beeped his horn with enthusiastic approval as he watched two Kentucky Vehicle Enforcement officers balance the large truck beds on portable $40,000 scales.

A year after it began, the state's crackdown on overweight coal trucks in Eastern Kentucky hasn't broken down.

"I just wanted people to know the enforcement is here to stay," KVE Commissioner Greg Howard said yesterday. "It's not a fly-by-night thing."

Final numbers had not been tabulated yesterday, but in four days, KVE officers weighed at least 957 coal trucks in Eastern Kentucky this week and wrote only 32 overweight tickets.

Most officials were not surprised. "They know we're here," KVE officer Gary Mullins said yesterday. Howard, however, pointed out that up until last year's unexpected blitz -- resulting in more than 200 overweight tickets -- nearly all of the 1,800 coal trucks traveling U.S. 23 daily exceeded the state's generous weight limits.

For more than three decades, in fact, law-enforcement agencies had essentially ignored the speeding, grossly overweight trucks that occasionally killed people in traffic accidents and pulverized the 114-mile four-lane highway, which is Eastern Kentucky's main north-south artery. Because it leads to a sprawling complex of barge-loading facilities on the Big Sandy River near Catlettsburg, it also is generally considered the nation's busiest coal-haul road.

Kentucky's maximum fine for overweight trucks is $500, although judges in most mountain counties levy lower penalties.

Under Kentucky law, 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs are legally permitted to haul up to 126,000 pounds of coal -- 46,000 pounds above the federal weight limit. But until last year, Howard said trucks frequently were caught carrying up to 200,000 pounds. Last year, Howard began an unprecedented, unflinching crackdown on the heavy trucks on U.S. 23 and elsewhere. Mountain motorists who shared the highway with the heavy trucks said they felt safer.

"It's like they've taken the biggest, baddest shark in the ocean out of the water," said Rick Caudill of Martin in Floyd County last year. "It just feels safer. A lot safer."

Yesterday, Caudill said he wasn't feeling so safe. Loads are getting big again, he said, and trucks seem to be running faster.

"That stuff works good for a while," Caudill said. "But then they slip it back and slip it back."

Now Howard and KVE are back.

Howard said such complaints helped trigger this week's weight checks. Another blitz is planned later this month, he said.

"Probably they have been slipping back a little bit," he said, but not nearly in the numbers they were. "We're doing a pretty good job, but we're never going to get them all. There is still plenty of work to be done by everyone."

He said KVE officers working Wednesday night arrested three coal-truck drivers for drunk driving and nine others on drug charges.

Officers also have dealt with other issues raised by the weight crackdown. One day, Howard said, Internal Revenue Service agents joined KVE officers to check the fuel in coal trucks. Five truckers were cited for using off-road fuel to avoid paying a 25-cent road-usage tax, he said.

There also have been complaints about an increase in speeding coal trucks since the vehicles began hauling lighter loads, he said.

Truckers say the lighter weights enable them to make three trips a day, instead of two, to the Boyd County coal docks. But Floyd District Judge Eric Hall noticed that one danger effectively was being replaced with another.

"From personal experience, I've noticed that since the trucks are hauling less weight, they're driving faster," he said recently. "Once they're hauling lighter loads, they're really putting the pedal to the metal. A loaded truck northbound on U.S. 23 passed me the other morning doing 87 miles per hour and that's way, way too fast for a loaded coal truck."

Howard said his agency also gets complaints about speeding coal trucks on two-lane roads in rural areas and plans to act on them.

"I have a plan, starting this month, to really write a lot of speeding tickets," Howard said. "That's so much easier for us to address than the weight issues."

Operating the roadside scales in Johnson County yesterday, Mullins said five overweight tickets had been issued to truck drivers, not the coal companies for whom they worked.

At one point, some Kentucky legislators said they wanted the coal companies who loaded the trucks -- not the driv-ers -- to be held responsible for overweight loads. But KVE officials said last year they discovered language in the state law that allowed them to cite shippers or the loading docks that receive the cargo.

That has not happened frequently, Howard conceded, although he said the agency has cited the coal company, Appa-lachian Fuels LCC, which overloaded the truck that killed a Martin County minister during the recent General Assembly debate over House Bill 8.

The bill, which failed, would have allowed trucks transporting other taxable Kentucky natural resources, such as gravel and sand, to haul as much weight as coal trucks.

Howard declined to discuss HB 8.

"Whatever the law is out there, we're going to enforce it," he said.