Police look for suspect vehicle in deadly I-40 tanker truck crash

Nah! No sympathy! They just wrote a check their ### couldn't cash.

 

As a tanker driver they told us this in training class and every quarterly safety meeting thereafter.
They told us that regular rigs have a fatality rate of 1 in 10 for rollovers. Tankers are 1 in 4. And it's not an easy death.
Anyone ever seen the safety video "Remember Charlie" ?

 

As an oldtimer I still remember a tanker driver swerved to avoid a car that cut in front of him on the 91 fwy in Ca. killing him when he rolled & exploded. I drove Ltl freight for 45 years & no way I rolling my junk over a fool in a car. Had a guy pull out of a shopping center hanging a left, laid on the horn but he went under my trailer & the car was crushed. He lived bless God.

 

I’ve seen it, but Remembering Charlie has nothing to do with pulling a tanker.

 

Perp's vehicle is a lowrider with no license plate.

Whadda surprise.

 

He wasn't a truck driver.
It was what he went through from the burns that freaked everyone out.

Knew a guy that burnt to death in his truck. Wasn't anything left to bury. Only knew him from the loading racks but he seemed like a good guy. And there were stories from other terminals of things that happened.

Gut reaction is to swerve to try to avoid the accident but if you go over you may die and take some innocent people with you. Holding your lane is something that you need to think about before it happens.

 

You never know how you react in this situation , different people - different instincts

 

The instinct to swerve is really strong. Your brain wants to avoid hitting something in front of you. The problem is that physics is not your friend when you swerve in a truck, especially a tanker. That's why you have to make a conscious decision that you're going to hold your lane before anything happens. You have to really think about it, more than once.

I haven't pulled a tank for over a year now, but I still think about "what if this jerk actually turns his pickup into my lane in front of me?" scenarios. Same for deer and antelope and elk, which I see a lot grazing on the shoulders of two-lane highways in the middle of the night. Large stupid animals are a real hazard.

It paid off last spring, too, when a jagoff hydroplaned in front of me, bounced off the wall and ended up back in front of me. I didn't swerve, I hit him hard, and I was able to pull over to the shoulder upright. I thought I'd killed him, but he was fine. More importantly, I was fine. That's not selfish, that's reality. I'm not the jerk that was doing 80 in a 55 zone in a downpour. If one of us had had to die, I would have wanted it to be him and not me.