Flatbed drivers please respond

That's about it isn't it.. Three inches of that brown ice caked on the sides - then they would drop the lumber you spent all that time tarping in a slushy mud puddle. Used to make me wonder..

 

Yeah, we tried that. I worked for one of the big companies and we'd be tarping things other companies weren't but the shippers required us to - must have been one of those we'll tarp it for the same rate things. Oh well, I haven't had to worry about it for almost 7 years now.

 

yep, that always sucks, but usually by the time im done wrestling with the tarps and beating my straps with my bar enough to get them sort of wound up, i'm too tired to be angry when they drop my nice neat load in a snow drift, hahaha.....

what always makes me mad is tarping shingles. why am i tarping something that is designed to sit outside IN THE ELEMENTS for decades?

 

yeah, but its not that big of a deal to tarp, and if they pay you to do it, why not? as long as you aren't held to crazy tarping standards like tmc is!

 

best advice I ever got was when you pull out of a yard and you are starring in the mirror to see what moves/falls, you didn't tie it down good enough, might as well pull over and fix it right away.
P.S you still need to keep an eye on the load and obviously check the load regularly

 

Oh I got one better. There was a company last summer that got a contract to reroof all the buildings at an air force base. They had all the instructions on how the AF wanted the materials stored and followed them. Had everything stockpiled a few miles from the base, most of it inside rented containers. The AF inspector came out, looked at it, and told them that it wasn't good enough. He wanted it all inside a climate controlled warehouse. Yeah, shingles had to be inside in the A/C. So they had to move everything 18 miles to the warehouse on their own dime. AF wouldn't even pay for it.

 

LOL, the same GovCo that wants to run the healthcare in this great nation...

 

Indeed. From the looks of the pallets that have been slowly stacking up outside the warehouse, they only just now completed that job. And this was almost a year ago that I helped them move all that stuff.

 

Very bad habit to get into is using the strap to "rappel" down the side of the load. More than once I've seen a driver get "turned around" on the top of the load and grab the wrong end of the strap. Express ride to the ground.