Indian River Transport - Tulsa OK, a very bad co.

You've obviously never left the asphalt with an OS/OW load then....Hauling 150,000lbs.+ down a muddy goat trail can get pretty interesting sometimes....For instance if you need to back up a bit to get you RGN straight to unhook and your rear axle rolls into a muddy loader track.....sometimes just a little dip like that is all it takes to catch a flap under your rear axle tires....

 

See post above.....

 

Are you still working for IRT? I applied and have been accepted but wIting till the holidays are over to change companies.

 

I drove for a similar and more or less competitor of IRT when I lived in phoenix as a company driver. It was a pretty brief stint for me. Maybe 4 months. At one point, someone at IRT tried to get me to come over. This was my only tanker gig and I learned quickly that food grade was not the best gig. I doubt IRT is any better or worse than other similar companies. Load times were often long. So long that sometimes you would have to cool the tank a 2nd time prior to getting loaded. Yet despite some ridiculous wait times at a shipper, delivery times were still expected to be met even when doing so legally couldn't possibly be done. Show up late and the load could very well be rejected and then you're stuck trying to find a place to dump thousands of gallons of egg yolk or something. This happened to a few guys I knew. I wouldn't mind pulling tanker again some day but chemical is where it's at. Problem is tho the vast majority of it is company drivers. Not O/O.
As for the OP, Not sure what to think. While a tire catching fire is certainly possible for reasons not necessarily his fault, there's also reasons where it could have been. Who am I, or anyone here for that matter, to judge without all the facts.
As for mud flaps, some of you guys have obviously driven OTR and on road only. I use to pull a walking floor delivering mulch to landscapers off road and to farmers who used it for bedding often backing into a barn nearly axle deep in cow ####. Sometimes getting pulled out with a tractor was pretty much a given. If you can't possibly fathom how mud flaps can be torn off, you haven't been around the many different areas of trucking. Just the cushy OTR part of it.
realsupatrucka? Hardly me thinks