Should Drivers Be Blamed If Criminals Or Shippers Put Illegal Cargo In Their Trailers?

Stories like this make flatbedding look better and better. Less pieces to count, anyway. :)

I'm new to all this, haven't even started school yet so this may be a dumb question. But if you can't watch them load how do you make sure it's loaded properly concerning weight distribution?

Once it's loaded. Move the trailer tandems to a spot where it would be legal and where you think it would be best. Then go to a CAT scale and scale yourself. It'll show you the weight on your steers, drive axles, and trailer tandems.

After you do it for awhile you'll start to know exactly where to move the trailer tandems.

Sorry for raising some of these threads from the dead, but it doesn't make sense to me to start a new thread on the same subject. If it is preferred, let me know.

Anyway, I had the same question, but also, how do you know if the load is properly secured in a sealed trailer?

Hey GOM, if you pick up a sealed trailer, you have no liability if the cargo wasn’t secured properly. The only thing you’re responsible for at that point is sliding the tandems to make sure you are legal at weigh stations along your route.

I had a load where the load assignment said “SLC” which means shipper load & count which makes it the shipper’s responsibility to load it properly & count it too. I go in the office & they have signs everywhere that driver has to count load. I refused. When asked to initial if I counted or refused to count? Of course I initialed that I refused.

This in one of my pet peeves with job. They want me to count thousands of boxes that most times are sealed in cellophane on pallets. Del Monte in south Jersey insists the driver “counts” the load. Again, the lumper is coming with 2 pallets on his forklift, how am I supposed to count a full pallet that’s stacked in whatever way they want.

If they want us to count properly? We’d have to be there for 8-10 hours watching them sort & stack each pallet. At a receiver, they had 1 lumper off load me. ONE! He would take out a pallet, break it down, count it & then sort it on separate pallets. Almost 10 hours I sat there.