Florida Rock and Tank Lines????

Discussion in 'Motor Carrier Questions - The Inside Scoop' started by KMLAQ, Oct 14, 2009.

  1. FRTL_DoraWarning

    FRTL_DoraWarning Bobtail Member

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    Feb 24, 2011
    Atlanta, Ga
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    Hi. I was just sitting here on the computer and for craps and giggles searched for florida rock and tank lines and got to this thread. .. Decided to register here most likely for just this one message to add my 2 cents about florida rock and tank lines.. aka to me florida C**k and Tank Lines. Saw this thread was still kinda recent so heres some input... this post may be kinda long.. I hate reading super long strung out posts but here I go about to create one. for what its worth, here goes.

    I recently worked for the doraville terminal for a few months last year. Heres the deal.. I previously worked for schneider doing regional dedicated retail out of forest park and figured I could do better than 45K or so a year and about 40-50 hours off at home each week.

    I talked to a few Florida Cok drivers before I started working there, not all of them actually parked at the doraville terminal as some parked at the marathon terminal in powder springs and i think another parked at a small yard in forest park, but dont forget they are all dispatched out of doraville which is where I worked. All four of the ones i talked to refueling at the west atlanta petro and dropping fuel at various locations all said that they liked the place. They said that the work wasnt too bad and basically that you can take as many loads as you feel comfortable with. How many you do is up to you as long as you dont slack off too much. I dont specifically remember them saying anything about how good or bad the trucks and tanks were though, they just said that overall Florida C**k is not too bad a place to work.

    Well, I figured that just by listening to the reports by 4 actual drivers would be the best foreward info that I could get about the place, but that wasnt really true.

    I dont know what the turnover rate at the doraville terminal was but I can assure you it was pretty high last year. When in training I asked what it was and the trainer said it was kinda high. When asked why he just said it wasnt for everyone and of course some people quit for various reasons. Well, I think the main reason why its so high is because that particular terminal can be kinda sucky. I cant say too much bad about the terminal manager. Hes kinda quiet but not too bad. Brian is pretty fair all things considered. Not descriminatory at all, at lest so he seems to me. Thats important info to a lot of people wanting to know more about places before they jump in and I didnt get a negative vibe about that at all. The problem is with the way things are run over there.

    Here is what you have to consider before working for florida C**k in doraville.

    Your days will be 12-14 hours. You will be dispached to work your entire 14. I doubt they cared a whole lot about getting your truck back within 12 hours for your shift partner. You cant just turn down a load. Your expected to work you full 14 if needed. What this means is that if you live more than 30 min away from the terminal you will be one majorly tired driver during your work week because after work you have very, VERY little time at home. WHen you get back, you will need to eat, crap, and shower then get to bed immediately. No play time, no video game time, .. NOTHING. EAT, SHOWER, CRAP, SLEEP. thats your time at home daily, bud, for the doraville Florida C**k terminal.

    You may have an assigned truck within a few months. There was one lady that worked there for just over a year and never recieved an assigned truck. It is very important to have an assigned truck. Every truck/trailer combo has different quirks and slightly different equipment. Some trailers might need a certain back forth rocking combo to unlock the park brakes or need a quarter shim or something before giving air to the chambers or giving a green light to load..(tanker trucks now have valves by all the loading caps and equipment doors so if youre still hooked up to load you cant drive away and rip the loading hose off). if you dont know that particular trailer's quirks your day will be f.u. after all the jerking around you will be doing trying to find out which switch is being quirky. Since yorue paid by the load, you are not compensated for this time jacking off.

    On another note with respect to assigned trucks.... many times here is what would happen at FLorida Co*k Doraville. Theyre geniuses with dispatching drivers over 12 hours while two drivers are supposed to share the same truck. They may not understand that there are only 24 hours in a day.. maybe they think there is 26 or 27 but theres not. !!! I cant stress this enough. What will happen is they will be doing their thing and dispatching your shift partner over his 12 hours... so you show up to work and the truck isnt back. Well, guess what partner, they have your loads already lined up for the day, at least most of them. So, sucker, the longer you wait for your truck, the longer you will take to get done, and if you go over your now 11- hours to do the loads then your shift partner wont have the truck when hes supposed to get it either and the cycle continues.

    To solve this, and this is just super... they may have a load on you when you get in that has to be done kinda fast. This happens a lot. So the grand smart Florida Co*k Doraville way to make this happen is to tell you to take someone elses truck and trailer. Hahaha. So you do this knowing that youre going to screw someone else out of their truck. Guess what happens when that driver gets there and his truck is gone because they told you to take it?? yours then is taken by that driver. You may never see your truck that day. What happens on those days, especially if youre new, is you will be comming back to drop your borrowed truck to pre trip another truck to do your next load. On these frequent days, you will definately be pushing yhour 14, and your day is going to suck all day.

    You will earn about $500-maybe $600 a week after taxes being married, so less if youre single. That makes maybe 35 some K a year before tax. Of course, you may fall into the next lower tax bracket working there so maybe that will help. This is an ode to the crappy pay at the doraville Florida Co*k terminal. One day I came in and did my first load. Next, I was waiting at the terminal for my second load destination station to open so they could call it to generate the proper gallons for me.. no prob.. But while waiting for that one, something overlooked came up. They asked me to hook up to the special jet fuel only trailer and go to a place called Brenam or B- something georgia.. just a few miles from alabama off of I 20.. to load defense fuel to take back to atlanta's dobbins AFB. I never loaded at this place before, but they wanted me to go there anyway. I was fine with this, because they said theyd load me when i got there, which they did. That was ok, but what wasnt was the trailer. I hooked up to the trailer and 3 of the loading heads were missing their hose adaptors so the caps were just dangling there on the chains and you need the adapters to hook the caps to. It took about an hour to get replacements for them while every now and then a higher up comes out and nicely asks the status of getting the load done. They werent a holes about it I just think its funny how they can expect something to be done on they fly like that with such screwed up equipment and no fast way to get what the parts you need from maintenance. Driving out to brenam, them loading me, driving back to dobbins and offloading one tank at a time via pump off ha ha took 6 + hours. Total pay? $51.47 or soemthing + or - a few bucks. This is not a joke. That was the total pay. They do NOT pay you to deadhead out, or back, be that the case, for the matter.

    On another note... the trucks. Oh the trucks. Now this may not all be Florida Co*k's fault here. They got a bunch of new automatic macs.. They were weak as hell, but they were very nice trucks, the nicest newest trucks id ever driven in my short 3 years as a driver. The only problem is that the macks broke down so often it F*ed everything up even more than normal when more than a couple were broken at once. These Mack Pedigree trucks with Mack engines broke all the time for all different reasons. The new transmissions failed without warning often. Im sure it happenned to all drivers there, some truck mishap, but I think Florida Co*k at least tried by buying those new macks.

    Something else I almost forgot. This is a fun tidbit. The equipment on the trailers was missing many times. Usually it was stolen by other drivers, but heres the deal on that. There simply was not enough total equipment parts for everyone to have all that they should have when they should have it. You were always going to be short a hose, an adaptor, and DEFINATELY you are going to be lacking a clip on drop head. Oh, and if you go somewhere that requires something that you dont have its your fault totally and completely because you didnt do your pre trip. Ha. WHy bother when you wouldnt be able to get what you need from maintenance anyways. If you need something that was stolen from your trailer before you leave, the papa smurf maintenance guy (who was an a hole) will just direct you (if you can understand his dialect) to a f*ed up, ivy overgrown shed around the back of the shop filled with broken parts, drop heads, crushed hoses, where youre guaranteed to not find what you need. not all the maintenance guys were a holes. No names will be mentioned, but thes papa smurf guy was the most a holey guy over there. But like I said not all the maintenance guys were a holes. The shop leader was very nice. There was also a skinny guy that worked there at night and he was absolutely helpful- possibly one of the 5% of people in this world that is inherently non-cynical.

    I think a major consideration of deciding to work here is WHICH terminal you work out of and if youre hauling gas around a major city or not. For example, if you work out of the chattanooga FRTL terminal, ive heard its not too bad. Some of the drivers that ive talked to who ran out of chatanooga FRTL terminal do a couple long loads a day and make quite the $$$, say over 200 a day for running 2 long loads, and who knows if they they squeezed in 3. It is my understanding, and this is an important consideration if youre wanting to run gas, is that if youre going to be delivering around a major city you are going to be out of the truck more than youre in and the loads may not pay a whole lot- leaving you to work at a faster pace to get more loads done to get some form of decent pay. In contrast, if you run out of a more remote place like chatanooga you will have more longer loads where youre driving more than youre on/off loading and it makes your job all the easier. Longer loads to me mean a more standardized time frame to do them. Even if youre cutting several corners unloading you still can only get there so fast because of the distance. Seems like with the pay per load so low out of atlanta's doraville Florida C**k terminal, I guess they wanted you to speed through several short ones quickly to make your pay where it should be. Oh well, its just soemthing else to think about when considering doing this.

    Oh, also. .. Your load imformation will be f*ed up. FRTL, at least doraville, uses an electronic logbook qualcomm. Its allright, and thats where you will get your load info from. A major negative about Doraville Florida Co*k is that about half the time you will not get enough information on your assignment to load the fuel. I suppose I could write another two or so pages about this but i dunno.. just take my word for it. YOu will get the loading terminal to load at, gallons of course with product, and who to load off. The source of concern with respect to the lack of information on your load assignment will be with the Who to load off. FOr those who dont know, you dont just go to the loading terminal and punch a button for product, set gallons, and load. Naa, ha haha, You dont do that, dude. There are hundreds of customers to load off. If you pick the wrong one you can get it for a mix. depending on what customer you pick can mean the difference between branded and unbranded gas. This is very, very important that you pick the correct customer. Just cause you chose unlead and the load assignemnt says get all unlead dosent mena you got the right unlead. All unlead isnt all the same, even from the same terminal. FOr those that havent hauled gas, understand that. **The additives are different depending on the customer or contract *** !!!!! FRTL- Doraville will not give you enough info to choose the correct customer to load off. Heres the deal.. youll get a load.. Terminal: Motiva West. Product.. unlead 7600 (7600 gallons of regular unleaded gas) Simple enough, right? Youd think so, especially in this advanced time, right? Wrong. Here we get to the next part of the load assignment: Customer: Indigo. Then after Customer theres a spot on the bottom for Special Instructions, which sounds like a decent spot to find more info right? heh wrong. That section is always blank. And thats what you get! Sounds quite simple, right? Wrong. The dispatchers, no matter how many years theyve hauled gas or did this or that or worked there, do not understand completely what you have to enter when you hook up to load gas. So, we go to motiva west and hook up to load (barring any problems witht he trailer getting a green light of course. if you dont get a green light with a trailer that you dont know much about youre going to be screwed for free for the next hour or two) Ok, so you card in, punch up the computer to load and select customer, secondary customer and such, supplier whatever.. and here find indigo. Heres the problem, and this is probably one of the main facotors in what made me quit. First of all, its called Indigo Energy Systems, LLC or something to that nature, not just "Indigo", and, there are two of them with exactly the same name but different customer/supplier numbers.
    Well, your load assignement didnt specifiy any particular number, and you can get unlead from both numbers, so which one to choose?? one might be a contract fuel with different additives than the other one with might just be a general rack account. >..?? now what. Youre hooked up to the rack with a couple unlead heads on, scully and ground hooked up and here we go, we dont know what one to choose. Theres 4 trucks waiting behind you to load now what?? Not wanting to be a ding dong, you unhook, pull your truck out of the rack for the company behind you, who has the proper info to load in the rack, to pull in and load his truck. YOu walk to the designated box on the ground to use your cell phone, and call dispatch with your cell phone and tell them that there are two different supplier/account numbers for indigo, which weve determined is actually Indigo Energy Systems, LLC. When you call they will know nothing and tell you to ask the terminal. The terminal will not give a whole lot of info, but will be a little more helpful than the dispatcher. Most of the time, its up to you to determine the correct one to load off. Get it wrong and it could be a mix. Thats just the way it is at Florida Co*k Doraville ;) Remember, while youre being prudent and calling to check which one to load off, youre not getting paid :)


    All in all, I was going to move closer to the terminal so i could maximize my time at home with respect to commuting, but i never got that far. My considerations and circumstances led me to quit before moving there. Granted I was not fired, I left. In a sense, you could sum it up really easily and say well gas hauling wasnt for me, but its more than that. Summing it up that simply does not pay complete respect to the entire picture of working at doraville Florida Co*k. The same as any college, if you discover a high rate of failure it may not be the best place to go to school. High rates of failure dont necessarily mean a better, more exclusive place to go. I think thats the same with high turnover jobs. ..theres a reason for it. At FRTL Doraville the high turnover was probably due to - and others may confirm- long hours, low pay, improper equipment. That about sums it up.

    Oh, and finally, if you are considering hauling gas, see if you can check out how many terminals the place youre looking at working for wants you to load out of. FOr example, out of doraville, theres like 7 terminals there or something, with a couple more on the other side of atlanta and one or two in athens they want you to get a card at. Thats a lot of stress to train to get cards at all of them within a couple months when you start. Thats all youre going to be worrying about for a while is getting cards at these places and adds to the general complexity of the job. ..whereas if you just need to get cards out of 2 or 3 terminals and thats it, its a hell of a lot easier and more standardized- you wont have to be worrying about the rules of 10 different terminals.

    Oh and really finally, in 2010, at doraville FRTL terminal, there were several doraville PTC guys switching to FRTL there in doraville. I remember the safety guy seeing one and joking "You know things are bad at PTC when theyre comming over here." Heh, probably true, I dunno. From what I understood, the problem at PTC Doraville was the terminal manager, forrest or whatever. They say youll work 6 days and get 3 off but apparently they always will want you to come in on your off days and work to the point of not ever getting a restart. Oh well. I guess the idea of anything trucking is just to get you to work 70 hours a week with no overtime so i guess that wouldnt be to bad of an idea as to never get a restart. The only thing is that you would have to always be watching your hours and may not be able to squeeze in that umteenth load for the week to keep your pay at 32K/yr.

    just my thoughts....thanks. I might check this thread every now and then if anyone has any ?s about giving doraville FRTL a shot. Remember, if yuoure trying for FRTL in another city it may not be bad at all. Keep in mind the considerations you should take with respect to terminals you will need to card at and city size youll be delivering to and you might love frtl. good luck all. !!
     
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  3. Rug_Trucker

    Rug_Trucker Road Train Member

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    Aug 7, 2009
    Near Nashville TN
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    Well thank you Dora. This is an easy to read thread with a lot of insight into the fuel biz. I had it easy back in the day. I had a single hole tank. Loaded at Shell, or Exxon in Tampa, Port Canaveral at Belcher, and Exxon in Port Everglades.
     
  4. SmokeMac

    SmokeMac Medium Load Member

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    Jan 31, 2009
    Savannah, GA
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    FRTL_DoraWarning Ireally believe that the problems is with your termianal and not FRTL. I hauled gas out of Savannah and their drivers seemed pretty happy. They didn't have much turn over on the Gas side. Don't know about chemcals but all there gas hualers have been there 3 or 4 years. I couldn't imagine trying to haul gas in Alanta it must be a nightmare
     
  5. Rug_Trucker

    Rug_Trucker Road Train Member

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    Aug 7, 2009
    Near Nashville TN
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    Anyone know about Nashville?
     
  6. RecruiterFRTL

    RecruiterFRTL Bobtail Member

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    Jun 8, 2012
    Jacksonville, FL
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    Not all of the terminals are like that.... FRTL has like 20 terminals in the Southeast......
     
  7. mr truckdriver

    mr truckdriver Light Load Member

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    Mar 2, 2008
    ft myers fl
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    Worked at the Ft Myers Fla terminal years ago and it was about the same way never enough equipment to do the job.
     
  8. whoopNride

    whoopNride Road Train Member

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    Jan 13, 2008
    Miss.
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    Wow, I couldnt handle that at all. I haul gas out of the Memphis,Tn market (never have to deliver it in Memphis though, Yipeeee) It is a pain getting "carded" at the diffrent terminals, but once that is done and you get used to it, I really enjoy it. I work days,10 to 12 hrs a day, average 1000.00 to 1200.00 per week, dont have to slip seat trucks, am off by 430 or 500 every day, sleep in my bed and shower at home. I AM HAPPY!!!!

    If you want to haul gas, find some good small local oil company that only hauls their own product,,,Lot Less Hassle.

    I hear the Kenan, Dupre, Florida Rock drivers complaining every day !!!!!

    That said, It IS A Dangerous Job....
     
  9. hotrod1018

    hotrod1018 Light Load Member

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    Jun 23, 2010
    Niceville fl
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  10. throttlejockey

    throttlejockey Bobtail Member

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    Oct 13, 2012
    Hammer Lane
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    Home every day shifts are 12 to 14 hours and pay is percentage pay. I worked at the nashville terminal for a year and half what do you want to know?
     
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