Hoffa Calls for Truck Safety at Maritime Ports

Hoffa Calls for Truck Safety at Maritime Ports

Mechanic Demonstrates How Illusive Chassis Dangers Can Be

December 9, 2003

(Port of Newark, NJ) – After challenging Congress to pass the "Intermodal Equipment Safety and Responsibility Act" of 2003, HR 2863, Teamsters General President James Hoffa and International Longshoremen’s Association President John Bowers directed attention to mechanic Ronny Capri who demonstrated the difficulty of safe chassis inspection.

"Once a year the wheels on these chassis have to be removed and inspected to insure they are safe," said Capri. "You can’t certify a chassis as road worthy with a drive by inspection. Truck drivers are not trained or equipped to do the inspection. The problem can be solved by providing routine preventative maintenance at the terminal to insure that drivers are given safe equipment to begin with."

The current practice at Maritime ports is to forgo the preventative maintenance and wait until the brakes or bearings fail. This policy has lead to a rash of deadly but preventable accidents in which innocent motorists fall victim.

Hoffa cited the recent 23.5 million dollar award to the family of a New Jersey physician killed on route 17 in Bergen County in a crash caused by the failure of the brakes in a Port of Newark truck chassis. Also in the last two months, eight people were killed in Chicago, six near Long Beach, California and one in Texas all because of equipment failure.

"When we can avoid these kinds of tragedies—it can no longer be called an accident," said Hoffa.

HR 2863, the bill currently before Congress, will require that all chassis sent out onto the highways have a record of inspections and repairs including the repair history. Any chassis needing repair will be red tagged and quarantined. And it will be a violation of law to assign an unsafe chassis to a port driver.

Seeking to improve truck safety by supporting this legislation has brought together the Teamsters, the International Longshoremen’s Association and the American Trucking Associations. The trucking companies and the unions believe putting safe chassis on the highway is a simple solution. If we don’t want unsafe chassis on the highway, don’t dispatch them to the drivers.