Chain restrictions penalties

I will tell you a story that happened to me 2 weeks ago W/ a load from Chicago to Portland. Hubby gets ill & is in the bunk. So, I am driving solo instead of team. On the 2nd night I stop in Little America for my 10. Get up do my pretrip. Everything is good. Hit the road. 3 miles down the road my trailer ABS comes on. Getting over to pull off in a safe spot. Figured it was just moisture & was going to wipe it off. All of sudden I see sparks coming from my drivers side tandems. I pull over. Grab my triangles, look at my tire. It's going flat, look at the inner one it is too. Put out triangles call breakdown. TA is 20ish miles down the road. This is 5AM. TA shows up @ 9 pm that night. Finish @11pm. I sleep at TA that night. Everything is good the next morning. Back to the grind.

Started to go up Cabbage WB. Not snowing, overcast. Right before I hit deadmans pass the chain sign came on. (Snowing like crazy, dark) Trooper is in the chain up area. Making everyone chain or fined. (No parking in chain area) No problem chained up and went slowly down the hill.

11 hrs is up. Go to park at the Truck stop at the bottom of the hill. It's full. Go parked at the casino down the road. Found the last spot available. Moved my truck back & forth a little for my tires to cool off.

Hubby feels better in the AM and said he will drive the 3 hours left to Portland. He starts his pretrip. As he is inspecting the truck, he realizes it had snowed & the wheels weren't as cooled as I thought. We had 6 inches of ice around my drives.

We start to shovel & use what ice melt we had left. Got enough moved away from the drives, throw chains on it. It didn't work. On a slight incline. Notice other trucks are having same problems. My husband walks to the TS to see if they have more ice melt. Nope

By this time other drivers are coming over to help dig us out. With all the help it still took us over 3 hrs to get out. If we would of had to wait for a tow truck, like a few drivers had to, that would of been 9+ HR wait.

How much time did I loose? 1 full day & 3 hours. I was in constant contact w/ the dispatchers/load planners.

When we got to Portland & dropped the trailer the next thing we did was to head over to Walmart and bought a lot more ice melt & kitty litter. Then laid out my chains and checked them to see if they needed any repairs.

It is always best to be prepared for worse case scenario. Even when you do, sometimes $h!+ happens.

 

A few years ago I bought some chains at the truck stop and when I took them out of the bag to try them all on they did not fit the, bag , said they were the proper size but they weren't

 

Umm no. Not the same thing. .45 pistol and 9mm ammo you have 2 paper weights.

 

I disagree because you have 2 useless items if you have a .45 pistol and 9mm ammo. A 5# sledge will EVENTUALLY get the job done when a jackhammer is a better tool.

 

I used COtrip for years in the oilfield up there. Used it again the other week. Has current conditions, and a ton of live cameras.

 

Well, it's Colorado, and sadly the History Major running CDOT isn't the smartest pea in the pod (actually I think she fell out of the pod and rolled away), you can go to Cotrip.org (you'll need to do this from a computer) and sign up for text alerts, they are marginally (by a wide margin, think yards not feet) reliable.