Supply chain issues

Our local community is currently reeling from the aftermath of a horrific accident that wiped out the Holiday gas station in L'Anse late Thursday night. A semi-truck veered off the highway, wiped out multiple pumps, struck and killed a customer pumping gas, and wound up smashed into the front of the building. An employee in the store was inured and required hospitalization; a customer talking to the cashier wasn't hurt. The fire resulting from the crash pretty much totaled the building. 

The truck driver and his passenger, a driver in training, were uninjured. The state police arrested the driver on suspicion of OWI (operating while impaired). He'll be in court on Monday for an arraignment on charges of OWI that resulted in death. And this the part that struck me: the dude is 22 years old. Twenty-two. Barely old enough to legally possess a Class A driver's license that allows for interstate operations. And he was training another driver.

Holy wah. In the weird way my mind operates the first thing that hit me after hearing the driver's age was just how fucking desperate is the trucking industry for drivers that they're resorting to using novices as trainers? The S.O. used to have a CDL. He did OTR for awhile. The company he worked for required all new hires to go through training regardless of their prior experience before they got turned loose on their own. His memory is that trainers were old. They were the guys who had hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of miles of experience. Just how much experience is it possible for a 22-year-old to have?

Then when I was going in to town yesterday to drop off my overdue library books, I saw the guilty truck being hauled up the highway, no doubt to a secure impound lot where the squints who do forensic analysis can go over both the tractor and the trailer with the proverbial fine tooth comb to make sure there's no possibility of a mechanical failure -- because you know that's going to be the driver's defense. It wasn't him: the steering crapped out or the brakes failed just as he came around that tricky curve on US-41.  And I did a double take. The name on the cab door of the incinerated truck was C. R. England.  

C. R. England is one of the more venerable names in the trucking industry. They're been around since 1920 (thank you Google). Unlike some other companies, they aren't the subject of jokes or general derision (like Swift, which has one of the more ironic names in the business). They're well established. They're not small. They don't (so far as I know) have a shady reputation. Just how pathetic and thin is the applicant pool when a company like C. R. England is resorting to using 22-year-olds as trainers?

I'll admit that I had been thinking the company involved would be one of the odd ones that to me always seem a little seedy, like Covenant. In fact, until I heard there was a trainee along for the E-ticket ride, I kind of assumed it would be a local owner-operator hauling wood chips to the bio-mass plant. Some of those guys do push the envelope when it comes to driving more than legal hours or skimping on equipment maintenance. But nope, C. R. England.  

I do find myself wondering just what happened to the trainee. Something tells me that person just might be considering different career paths now. . . Then again, having survived one dramatic truck crash, what are the odds they'd ever be in another?