Getting stuck on a lease road. Does your company charge you to tow?

With all of the eain we have had lately, we had four trucks get stuck Saturday, one truck Saturday night and one truck Sunday night. They just sent our mechanic out and used a winch truck to get them unstuck. All of them got stuck on the same stretch of a lease road. The shoulder sucked them over. Luckily no damage was done other than a little hurt pride on a few drivers.

 

When a company requires me to pay for something that went wrong i am at the wrong company and will promptly get a new company. To me if you want me to drive for you you accept the risk. It is stealing wages if the drivers pays. Go to the labor board if he actually does try to get you to pay.

 

I have been towed and pushed out more times than I can count, Its just part of working in the oil fields, normally theres no tow company , At least not on the oil leases I have deliverd to. You get stuck, you stay in your truck, a d9 or loader shows uo, you grab the cable connect it to your tow hooks and get back in and steer,

Valley Bulk is one of the companies tha would send us into oil leases, I paid for a winch out because It deemed it was my fault, they sent a copy of the bill to the boss. He called me in and I thought I was going to get canned.

But, no he thanked me, and told me in the future call him this was his responsibility,
The next payday there was 5 one hundred dollar bills in the envelop with my chck and a post it that said Thanks.

This is how your boss should have handled it.

 

Not too bad lease road
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Stuck off lease road (No not me)
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Seen this view a lot.

 

I've been stuck a couple times and have never been threatened that way. If it were to happen I'd hand my pusher the keys and tell him where to place them. If I wanted to be treated that way I'd go OTR.

 

as a company driver i have never paid to be winched out. nor as a o/o for that mater. I have never been stuck somewhere i shouldn't have been. we all always carry tire chains and heavy straps. as a company driver you get stuck in the winter time and don't have tire chains on you will probably get a ration of #### from your company. i have gotten myself out of a lot of sticky situations with chains including chaining in deep mud in the summer time.

if your not stuck too bad and just need a little nudge to get you going a lot of times we just get another truck to hook up with a strap if there is no heavy equipment around.

the worst i ever got stuck was my own fault middle of no where literally the definition of bfe 100 miles from no where took two winch trucks pull me out. i was still a company driver. dead middle of winter had just snowed not a single tire track into the lease the ditches were blown flat with the road the lease immediately off the county road. where i thought the approach was, it was not missed it by about 10 feet. was going less than 5mph deliberately swung wide drove straight into the ditch fully loaded about 105k lbs. steer axle dropped straight threw the snow steps nearly touching the ground. 4 3 railers on and it wouldn't budge made the call first winch truck showed up and just drug himself with the winch. so he bury himself in the opposite ditch and stood on the breaks to try to get a hold of something no dice ended up having to have two hooked to each-other to eventually get me out. never heard one peep from the company about it.

 

Those board roads are just a total crapshoot, you never know when the ends are going to break off and sink a steer. I've only been stuck once hauling crude, a pickup truck is luckily all the tug I needed to get out. When I drove concrete all of our company mixers carried a steel cable so we could pull eachother out if the need arose and it arose frequently. 2 weeks ago I pulled a belly dump out of his load, he managed somehow to drive up over his load and got hung up pretty good. These things happen off-highway, never heard of a company telling a company driver they would be on the hook for the bill. If you're stuck because you did something genuinely stupid you'll get an earful but never a bill.