The pros and cons Fuel hauling?

Is there a limit on how many hours you can work a week?

 

It's a lot of deceptively heavy physical work. Go, go, go every day. It can be a good job, depending who you are.

 

Amen to truck n trailer. I'm in a semi right now-not a fan

 

Yup been doing this 6 months love it and u can get these truck trailers into any station love those stations in downtown Portland

 

The racks can be a real pain the neck, with allocation and overfill systems. All in all Hauling fuel is a great gig Ive always preferred working with a shotgun though.

 

It is indeed a deceptively physical job, however. A fully-charged hose can be over 10 feet long and, completely full of fuel, you have to walk that thing out. We're talking maybe 50-100 pounds of repetitive lifting until every drop of fuel drains out. You can't spill fuel--at least, you can't spill any detectible or noticeable amount without a customer seeing it and panicking or having a discrepancy on your reconciliation (if the latter, you seriously screwed up.) Get a routine and stick to it. Never divert from the routine--when you do this, it will bite you in the butt at some point in the future. Double, triple and quadruple check your compartments and that your load is built properly before you load each compartment. Right product, right account, right station, right tank.

You do little things to prevent HUGE incidents and they become and integral part of your routine, a series of checks and balances if you will. For example, when you are loading at the rack, all empty compartments will have the dust cover off. When you finish loading a compartment and are moving on to the next, take the arm off the one you just loaded, snap it onto the next one to be loaded, and then put the dust cover back on the compartment you just loaded. This will tell you that the compartment is already loaded, and you'll never have to think about it. We have an overfill detection device that looks very uh, primitive. The Scully is a fiber optic light that detects fuel at a certain level in the fuel tank. If triggered--this is contingent on if the scully is even properly grounded--it will shut the rack down, and you'll be in deep doo doo. Back in the day if you overfilled a tank, you were spilling and spraying fuel at 650 gallons per minute. This has , in the past, killed drivers at the rack.

Cross dumps are also something to watch out for. Never drop product by color, always triple-check your product tag on your tanker, trace the line back, and check that you are dropping into the correct tank. Do it 2 or 3 times. Do it 4 or 5 times. Just make sure you're dropping into the right tank immediately before you pull that butterfly valve and start product flow. I am placing special emphasis on tracing your lines immediately before you pull the valve--any distraction between tracing the lines and pulling the valve can result in a spill or a cross-dump.

 

The heaviest thing I ever lifted was my clipboard.