Do NOT DO THIS -

I won’t condem her for driving it because I know there are lots of people that would still be risking it.
What I will do is be thankful she finally saw the light and did something about it and take some comfort in knowing that this experiance will most likely enable her to be more stubborn if she ever experiences anything questionable again.
I can about imagine the discussion that occurred between her and DOT and hopefully they drove the point about who is responsible to say NO IT AINT MOVING! In the future.
As bad of a decision it was to run it in the first place the lesson learned thankfully without injury or incident will create a better driver going forward.

 

When I was driving, I ONCE drove an empty trailer 300 miles with a flat inner tire (didn't even look damaged, looks like it just got de-beaded, and it held air when I did get it fixed) only because I couldn't get through to my company road breakdown department. It was on a night when there was a big blizzard in the mountains/upper plains, and I was running down south. In the morning, I DID finally get through to them, and got the tire fixed before I got loaded.

For the couple of years when I was the guy you called at night to get tires fixed, I never, EVER once told a driver to keep driving with a bad tire (at least not any further than the next tire place). Once or twice I had guys soldier on only because it would be many hours to get a road service truck out to them (mostly in rural parts of ID, MT, WY, etc.), and I got hosed more than once by cheap-### retreads when nothing else was available, but my guys always had 18 decent tires on the road.

 

Just for the new guys here this doesn't mean to be unreasonable. If a tire is looking bad but you're 10 minutes from a TA with no scales between you can limp it over there. If it's a shredded mess, that's probably a different story.

 

The funny thing thing is I bet the company she works for has between seven to eight thousand poster and memos and emails posted all over saying how much they worship safety. I have been lucky in my career. I call road breakdown about a problem, it gets fixed even if the load becomes late. Good company's know this. If you need to argue about getting your equipment fixed, you need to bail.

 

sure, absolutely