1,000 foot long "skid" mark centered in the right lane. Wheels froze?

I've seen that on with an empty trailer or light loaded trailer when air is lost to the trailer. When air is lost, the brakes will automatically engage. I've also seen it when the trailer hand lever on the steering column is accidently pushed down or partially down on a lightly loaded or empty trailer.

 

Our brakes are normally on and the air pressure releases them. It probably was an empty semi that lost air pressure and wasn't paying attention. We have air gauges and warning lights/buzzers. But someone caught off guard 1000' is not totally unreasonable when you are trying to maintain control. It's not every day something like that happens and they might of been inexperienced on what to do. That's only three times normal stopping distance and only a few seconds. I guarantee you they will be watching their air gauges more in the future.

 

A malfunctioning air leveler valve will also deflate the trailer air bags and let the stops rest on the axle. This causes most of the weight to be on one set of axles and the set with less weight locks up easily, really easily. Got a 2900 dollar overweight ticket when I went through a scale because of this (ouch).

 

Yea, the stops pushed down on the back half of the tandem and took weight off the front. Ended up being 7000 over on the back, even though I had only 32,000 total on the pair combined. It was an intermittent problem I didn't or couldn't catch on my pretrip. It apparently would only happen bouncing down the road. The Illinois DOT officer was a real ..... something and wrote the ticket to me instead of the company, saying I should have caught it. I honestly don't think many drivers would have caught that.

 

Happened to me with a load of lumber leaving California. I caught it when weighing at a truckstop. The only reason I weighed the load is the company paid us $10.00 extra to weigh. Air bags on front trailer axle had to be replaced.

 

Most likely an empty trailer and it lost it's air pressure (either the hose came unhooked up front or something took out the line underneath) and it drug the tires. You have to rememeber that a semi takes much longer to stop than a car, and they operate on air-pressure. Not like the hydraulic system in a car.