An old man's career goes flat, Snackbar moves to open deck

You're not the only one, your fellow OD driver that loaded with me had to wait until 0900 this morning before he could leave because of local congestion curfews. He waited 3 days to pick this load up, but after picking it up, he was initially told he would be dropping it in Wichita instead of getting the whole 3000+ mile run for a 12+' wide load...but today he heard that they changed their minds and he's running it the whole way. Makes it hard to trip plan when the planner is playing ping-pong with the load.

As far as doing a brake-check load balance...not sure I want to do that with this load.










Essentially what we are hauling out there is gonna be scrapped. The shipper said that he has been going around in circles with the receiver because the engineer will send him specs for something to build, he orders material, begins to fabricate what they want, then the engineer leaves and they hire a different engineer, who wants something different built, so he reorders different supplies, begins to fabricate...and it happens again. He said they actually had tanks built and shipped, but once they received them, they decided that what they ordered wouldn't work, cut the tanks into pieces and scrapped them. All of what we're hauling are the various different supply orders that the fabricator couldn't use and has been sitting in their back lot for years. The fabricator said they owe him over $300,000 and refused to release the stuff until they had the money in his bank. So my load is the plate steel they roll into tank bodies, still banded to pallets, covered in fire ants, and the cardboard wrapped around the pallets is coming apart. He said to chain it down as tight as necessary and to not worry about bending or warping it. The other driver has one tank body, and around a dozen lids that look like flying saucers, plus half moon shaped steel plates used for bases. All of this is going out there to be piled up in a scrap yard.


Oh, and all of this is taxpayer funded, the general contractor is working for the Department Of Energy doing a toxic dump cleanup. They have already gone thru $20 billion over the last 2 decades and are supposed to receive another $20 billion, assuming the government doesn't shut down first.

 

Unfortunately there are only 2 stacks of these plates, one stack is within a foot of the top deck, less than a foot between the two stacks and the rear stack has just enough room behind it to strap down my tarps sideways. Not a lot of shift room.

 

That was before opening.

Risers might have helped, but as weathered as these pallets are, not sure they would survive the trip without sitting on a flat surface.

Strange thing about the Wildwood scale, they weighed the whole truck, then pulled me up and had me split my trailer tandem across two scales. Not entirely sure why, no way either could exceed 20k by itself, and surely didn't come close to their tandem limit(or my tire rating limit)...then they pulled be into the parking area and bring in all my permits. Took a look at the paperwork, then said I could go...White Springs gave me the "on road" bypass.

 

Someone is way behind on their job duties...I don't think this truck stop has that many parking spots