Wrong turn...

I've been pulling a lot of ethanol out of Crockett these days, to KM San Jose. You'll find me in the ethanol offloading lane one night. Oh I almost got locked out of that rack the other night, the operator flipped on me because my internals closed up while loading and almost started blowing vapor. ###### air pressure leaks..

 

LOL, thank goodness no. This was the high plateau, no trees anywhere. Never worked for Swift.

 

Right on. I forgot to open an internal once but luckily it was at one of the company's bobtail racks at night. No scullys. De Anza eh? Nice, I'm loading at the next exit down on Foothill then taking a load across from Chevron SJ. Never hauled ethanol but it looked like a good gig for the day.

 

Just curious. When you're delivering fuel does the whole load typically go to one location or multiple locations? Never really knew how that worked.

 

No scully? How the hell do they get away with that. We all saw the training video of the guy who domed out the compartment before they had the scully. Dude was sitting in his truck cab, it burned the whole rack down when that vapor sprayed out of the dome and ignited. It killed the driver, I think it was at an Exxon refinery back a couple decades ago... Yeah, Kinder-Morgan will fine you if you blow vapor, the EPA watches them pretty hard. Ethanol is pretty easy to haul, we don't have to throw any hoses because the rack we deliver to usually has a hose sitting there. I found it rather boring at first because I was used to my rigorous gas station routine. Well have a good night, it's getting real out there and I'm usually off before the rush hour traffic hits hard.

 

In the vast majority of cases, the entire load goes to one gas station. Once in a great while we get dispatched to two stupid little gas stations with small tanks, and the load is split up to two separate stations. The underground tanks usually hold between 10,000 gallons and 20,000 gallons of fuel, filled at the legal limit of 90% of the total tank capacity (ullage). The tanker itself would hold a maximum of 9000 gallons in California, usually cut back to 8700 gallons for weight purposes. 7600 gallons or so if we're hauling diesel since it's heavier than gasoline. 8100 gallons max for ethanol due to weight restrictions. Any other questions we can answer them, you have a couple experienced fuel haulers on this thread.

 

Extra Lives Matter

 

I've had to call the Chicago PD for a couple of my mistakes. They have always been very helpful and friendly. They even got half the publics works dept to come clean an icy street for me when I got stuck trying to get off the dock at the tortilla place. Even rode in the front of the cop car to go get coffee, drinks and egg mcmuffins for that crew while we waited for the stuff to work. Had 2 streets blocked off for about 3 hours during morning traffic. I have recounted the U.S.Mail box I ran over on here before, I called the Chicago PD and after he realized how much paperwork and different agencies were going to be involved, he looked me in the eye and thanked me for reporting this damaged mailbox I found. Told me to have a nice day and get the hell gone with a grin.

Got hung up in Detroit one time and those cops were the same way.

In Hendersonville TN, I thought those rectal orifices were going to call out the National Guard on me when the truck died on New Shackle Island rd.

 

In this case the whole load went to that one stop. A lot of our accounts at that carrier were straight loads of diesel to trucking companies and straight loads of heating oil to schools and churches. I worked for some carriers that had retail station accounts, say for 7-11 stores in the area. Usually the load would be split between two stations, and the pay would be your percentage for the station furthest from the loadimg rack, plus additional stop pay.
One of the guys on days used to do a four way split between a group of stations that were within a few blocks of each other. We had 5 compartments on the trailer, so a five way split would be possible, but I never heard of one done at our terminal.

 

Oh, and those retail deliveries were done with those 13,400 gallon, six axle Michigan tankers. It's been a long time since I lived there. I heard they stopped using those and went to 12,000 gallon tridems.