What would do you in this situation?

Perfectly said.

I seem to remember him saying he drove 150 miles to the nearest truck stop then 150 miles back the next day, this is what set up or at least made worse the problems. Better choice to hole up nearby and conserve those hours that he later had to burn illegal time to get things done.

 

Have to call claims right then and there. it is more important to protect your CDL and DAC, driving record , than get that load delivered. You're at a stepping stone company, slip off the stone and be stuck there for a long time. I know because it happened to me.

MAC 22 would protect you from a service failure here. MAC to ONRoad too maybe.

Eat then got back to truck and put yourself on line 2 Sleeper.

Once in Sleeper, turn phone OFF, do not respond during your rest period.

Sit down and finish your meal.

Send the Breakdown message, truck or trailer documented with legit breakdown macro will protect you from service failures.

What was the purpose of going 150 miles to end your day? There surely were options to park much closer to this shipper certainly without burning 6 hours of your time off for free.

OK you were already counseled from Safety about driving over your 14 the day prior and you go and do it again? Last time I was at Lewiston, there were no gates, no fences. Take the trailer with you to Walmart. No one will know. Empty trailers are like pure gold over there never just leave one you need sitting around. Even though it is assigned to you a savvy dispatcher will pull it off you in the system in a second to get their own driver rolling toward a load.

OK I can't even....

OK correct me if I'm wrong, are you admitting your drove past your legal hours for a third time here by going to Kellog Walmart? And just to clarify, you ran through the road shut down gates, hopefully on the open side correct?

]

Driving illegal for the fourth time.....

I went through this entire post and counted 17 hours and 45 minutes where you were either gluing a mirror on, regenning the truck, stuck in the snow, waiting for a tire repair, sweeping a trailer etc etc but didn't have legal drive time 4 different times. I know it is technically illegal but that one time you were stuck for 4 hours at the shipper and 2 hours sweeping trailer, if you know how to do split break provision, 8 hours in the sleeper pauses your 14 hour clock, boom you had 6 hours of it knocked down already. Or at least log it all off duty and a mix of sleeper and make the time there at the shipper look like a full 10 hour break.

But i do get it, there will be those days that are simply wasted, just try to do better next time.

 

Thank you scottied67 I'm confident this new driver will soon realize that there are way to many things he can't control and you can't let them effect your better judgement.

 

After reading scottief67's breakdown of this thread I'm begining to question my own last post

 

Scottie, I would never have had the patience to make that post.
Thumbs up to you.

And it's really funny.
The OP didn't like my comment earlier on, and made that very clear.
Then you tell him to contact me for advice on the Swift way of things, then you go on to detail much of it for me.
And in the meantime he seems to have dropped out of the thread.

But what you, me and others have been trying to get across to the OP is to plan better.
We need to have food in the truck so we don't starve.
We need to check weather conditions so we don't get stuck in dangerous situations.
We need to know the company system so we can avoid service failures.
We need to know the company system so that we can plan our trips to our own needs, not what some computer says.

We also need to plan better so that shutting down in bad situations won't break the bank.
Sometimes that is difficult. But the alternative might be even worse.

 

Excellent thread, BTW. Mr Rover, I know it seems as if everyone is armchair quarterbacking, it they're not. You're thinking inside the box.

Before the weather went to hell, you knew it. You're near mountains, you check the weather. Everyone does. Before the snow started, you should have topped your tanks. If you're going to run the roads, you should keep some sort of provisions in the truck, you knew that. The line to the Loves 2 miles long sounds impressive. During the blizzard of 93, the line to the Petro in McCalla, AL was 60 miles long. They shut the big road down, everyone was stuck, cars and trucks. Nowhere to go. I heard about the backup and the road closure and I got off the bigroad, grabbed a motel, hit the atm and took as much money as I could. Cash is king in a catastrophe.

First thing you do when you hear bad weather is going to hit...TOP OFF THE FUEL TANKS. You don't wait. If you fueled up at the start of your day, ran your miles and parking for a break and you hear that the weather is going to get nasty, top your tanks off. I don't care if you have 3/4 full. Top it off! Why? Because you never know how long it will be until you find fuel again. Understand? Tell me that you understand.

What do you do, if all the truck stops are hemmed up, jammed up...etc? Think outside the box. I have found it necessary to drop trailers on the side of the street, bobtail into a gas station, and use their slow diesel pumps, even flip the truck around to be the other tank. Once, in northern Alberta, I was in an area with no truck stops. I dropped the trailer, went 30 miles to the nearest town, found a Shell station, and topped my tanks off. Dispatch was yelling at me telling me that my destination was only 100 miles away. I had a quarter tank. Do you run up a dirt road a hundred miles in northern Alberta Canada with a quarter tank of fuel or do you stack the odds in your favor for survival and get fuel before going off-road? You run out of fuel, you're part of the food chain.

Water. You need water. In a flood zone, the drinking water gets contaminated. Grab a couple gallons of water. You should keep a gallon at all times.
They sell canned goods in that mom and pop shop. Might not be what you like, but it will fill the void and feed the machine. Survival is the goal.

(Here's the danger)
Despite the warnings of bad weather, despite the shortage of fuel, despite not being prepared for the worst, you kept driving. You got guts. But running head first unprepared into danger is foolish. There's no glory winning the title of world's toughest steeringwheelholder.

 

So Swift allows a driver like you to haul explosives?

Do you want to explain to everybody how this "DOT safe have provision" works? I think some are not up to the same speed as you on the subject.

 

How do you get down that low on fuel in the winter time? I barely ever let it go below half, and I've only got two 120 gallon tanks.