In the News
Posted on Sun, May. 05, 2002
War on Dangerous Trucks Special Report:
Rogue Trucks
Since Philadelphia started impounding rigs for violations, two things have happened: Crashes have decreased and truckers have begun to cry foul.
By Jere Downs Inquirer Staff Writer
It is about to become the 1,454th casualty of the Philadelphia Truck War: the toughest - and some charge, the most unfair - crackdown in the nation on dangerous rigs.
From his parked cruiser, a highway patrolman spots a suspiciously faded green road-tax sticker on the garbage truck. He pounces.
Three hours later, driver Anthony Galiano, a private hauler from South Philly, has a fistful of damp tickets for not only the outdated decal but defective brakes, brake lights, windshield wipers and high beams, plus lack of a commercial driver's license and a fire extinguisher - $2,210 worth of infractions.
Worse, his truck is on the end of a tow hook, bound for an impoundment lot. Galiano begs to take it home.
No way, says Sgt. Jeff Ziernicki: "You might as well have a loaded gun in your hand. God forbid you kill someone."
So the truck stops here.
To be exact, 1,603 of them, pulled off Philadelphia roads since April 2001 and seized for safety violations.
Big-rig wrecks on city interstates are down 69 percent from the previous year. The pot of paid fines is fatter by $1.3 million. And truckers are howling mad, enough to threaten a federal civil-rights lawsuit.
The seizures are "an abuse of power," says Gail Toth, director of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association, whose members are second to Pennsylvanians on the most-nabbed list.
Calling the crackdown "un-American and unconstitutional," she promises a fight.
Ziernicki, head of the city's nine-officer truck troop, replies: "Bring it on."
Last spring, fed up with major tractor-trailer crashes an average of twice a week, Philadelphia Traffic Court and the Police Department's Highway Patrol pressed into service a never-used 1999 state law allowing impoundment of unsafe trucks.
Before, a trucker's odds of being stopped in Philadelphia for safety violations were slim. Only three officers with the requisite federal certification were pursuing and inspecting rigs full time.
Drivers who got ticketed were usually free to go on their way, and for the 60 percent who never paid, the consequences were virtually nil. No surprise, scofflaw truckers stiffed Traffic Court for $5 million in the last decade.
Now, the nine officers who roam the city may stop any truck for inspection, without cause. If the tickets they write exceed $250, it is seized.
To retrieve it, the driver must go to Traffic Court and pay truck bail: often the entire fine (the highest so far, $13,570 for an overweight load), plus court costs ($69 per ticket), towing ($250), storage ($50 per weekday), and paperwork fees ($75).
That does not end the ordeal. The driver must fix the truck at the lot - replace a taillight, strap down an unsecured load - or have it towed to a repair shop.
Trial is set within 30 days, at which time the trucker can argue his innocence and his right to at least some money back.
"I use tools in this courtroom that have never been used before," says Traffic Court Administrative Judge Fortunato Perri, who hears most truck cases. "I get a lot of heat. But I'm going to take it... . We are changing the safety of the highways."
The numbers suggest that something has indeed changed out on the roads. Last year, 39 truck crashes occurred on city stretches of interstates such as I-95 and the Schuylkill Expressway. In 2000, there were 128.
However, it is impossible to say whether the decrease is more the result of fervid enforcement or the warnings crackling CB-to-CB among truckers to take routes around Philadelphia.
"I will not run through Philly again," says Ken New, owner of Florida hauler Star Intermodal.
Last November, one of his drivers was transporting an 89,000-pound trencher - 85 feet long, 10 wide, 14 high - from Florida to Newark. In evening rush on I-95 at Cottman Avenue, police stopped him for moving an oversized load after dark, found he had no city permit, and called for the hook.
New paid $1,507 in fines, plus towing and storage. The trencher reached New Jersey two days late, delaying an environmental cleanup of a gas station and costing him a client.
"I can't estimate how many thousands of dollars we lost," he says. "The punishment didn't fit the crime."
Most firms dig as deep into their pockets as necessary to spring their vehicles. After police seized half of Anthony Galiano's two-truck fleet on March 20, it took him 11 days to raise the cash - including $825 in impound fees - to bail out Big Yellow.
But in the annals of truck jail are tales of others, usually one-rig ventures, just calling it quits. Their abandoned trucks, and sometimes rotting loads, litter the 14-acre impound yard at 61st Street and Passyunk Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, a private lot owned by retired police officer Eddie Alfano, who contracts with Traffic Court.
Every 60 days, the court auctions off unclaimed rigs. So far, 102 have been sold, totaling $57,096. The court gets what it is owed, Alfano gets storage fees, and the trucker gets the rest - more often than not, zip.
"They're putting guys out of business," says Toth, representing 1,000 Jersey truckers. "They're stopping interstate commerce."
Toth's group, along with the 2,330-member Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, has appealed to Perri and the truck squad to lighten up and allow drivers to make minor repairs at roadside.
"We want the bad guys off the road as much as anybody else," says Jim Runk, director of the Pennsylvania association. But "we have to figure out a way to permit the good guys with a minor infraction a way to operate."
Barring that, Toth says, her group will file a federal suit against Philadelphia, claiming the punishment-first policy violates truckers' civil rights.
That proved a winning argument recently in Louisiana, which had similarly pursued unsafe trucks for 14 years.
In a class-action lawsuit, truckers argued that having their rigs impounded and being forced to pay fines before their guilt or innocence was even considered was unconstitutional. In January, a state judge agreed.
That apparently leaves Philadelphia's effort without parallel.
Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, police and district justices have not teamed up to seize unsafe trucks - although they have the same power as the city to do so. Enforcing truck safety is left, for the most part, to the state police and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Both agencies have helped impound trucks inside Philadelphia - but not outside.
"Once we got the truck, where would we put it?" says Sgt. Kevin Krupiewski, who oversees the state police's truck enforcement in the suburbs. He added, "You also need a judge to take the initiative."
In New Jersey, state law bars local police from getting federal certification to inspect trucks. Only state police can be credentialed, which is how they like it.
"If you let Newark do it and Trenton do it and every other town, you couldn't get a loaf of bread out of the state without two weeks of inspection," says State Police Lt. Bill Wade.
If New Jersey troopers find a truck to be unsafe, they allow repairs at roadside or order the driver to have it towed to a shop. They do not impound.
Philadelphia may not be alone for long, however.
New York officials are looking here to model a program for Manhattan, where truckers have operated "in an environment of no enforcement forever," says Joe Lee-Civalier, a state truck-safety director.
Philadelphia's truck squad inspects as many as 500 rigs a month. In Manhattan, only 100 trucks were stopped for safety checks in all of last year; 75 were deemed not even roadworthy.
Post-Sept. 11, Lee-Civalier says, the need to keep a sharper eye is "overwhelming."
o
The Philadelphia Truck War began, unofficially, with 37,000 pounds of fruit cocktail.
On Jan. 3, 2001, Canadian trucker Frederic Haché picked up a load of Costa Rican bananas and pineapples from the Camden docks and headed back to Ottawa.
Hitting the westbound Schuylkill just before 8 p.m., he set the cruise control at 68 m.p.h. (18 m.p.h. above the speed limit) and leaned over to slip off his sneakers - just as his tractor-trailer reached the 28th Street curve.
After skidding 323 feet, the rig jackknifed, spilling all of the fruit and shutting down the road for five hours.
Highway Patrolman Phil Devlin sat dejected in his cruiser, writing $1,951 in tickets for faulty brakes, falsified logbook, careless driving, and so on.
"They probably won't get paid," Devlin remembers thinking. "Like, why bother?"
In desperation, he opened his Pennsylvania Vehicle Code. Halfway into the 2-inch-thick paperback, he spied Section 6309. He called Judge Perri, Traffic Court's new boss.
Perri had inherited a broken system in which 60 percent of ticketed truckers neither paid nor showed up for trial.
"Truckers had nothing invested," he recalls, and "the court was too kind-hearted."
Perri found a fix in the state statute, aimed at extracting payment of safety fines from trucking firms that changed names rather than ante up.
"The tickets couldn't follow them," recalled Rep. Richard Geist (R., Altoona), chairman of the House Transportation Committee. "The idea was that if the state held their property, they had to pay."
However, he added, "I never, ever heard of it being used."
Until now. Each weekday, Perri sets truck bail for as many as a dozen drivers. Every other Wednesday morning, he reigns over 30 to 40 trials in "truck court."
Perri calls himself "the hanging judge." For sure, he is a forbidding presence. Black horn-rimmed bifocals separate a formidably large brow from a perpetual grimace. Years of Salems have given his voice a serrated edge.
"Next trucker!"
Angel Matos, 33, fidgets in the dock. That morning, as he hauled sheet glass north on I-95, police stopped him for illegally driving in the passing lane. Finding he also had no medical-fitness card, which is required of commercial drivers, they wrote $345 in tickets and took his truck.
"Don't be so nervous," the judge jokes. "I can't give you the gas chamber - although I'd like to sometime."
Perri's mood darkens when he finds that Matos already owes $351 in fines.
"Can I have a payment plan?" Matos asks.
No, Perri retorts. "We need a sheriff."
By afternoon, the North Philadelphia man is still stuck in the court holding pen, waiting for his girlfriend to bring the cash. Matos is incredulous: "I can't believe I was arrested."
The effect of the truck crackdown can be measured in numbers - of impoundments, paid fines, drivers' complaints. But the truer measure of success may be the conversions.
Between Jan. 24 and March 19, four trucks belonging to ABC Construction, a Bensalem building-materials hauler, were stopped. Three were impounded. The tickets they racked up totaled $5,000, for violations ranging from missing mud flaps to an unpermitted oversized load.
Then ABC had an epiphany.
On April 18, manager Mike Nugent sent the firm's 10 dump trucks into the city to be given the once-over by the truck squad. Now, every Saturday, an ABC safety official inspects the rigs; drivers also run checks every time they leave the yard.
"Sometimes you got to get a smack on the ass to wise up," says Nugent. "These other guys who say they don't like it - shame on them... .
"If one of my trucks killed you, I couldn't sleep at night."
Contact Jere Downs at 610-313-8128 or jdowns@phillynews.com.
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