Florida officials worry about excess truck weight
Lack of federal guidance, unified policies create security gap; excess weight of up to 1000 pounds typically overlooked; inability to distinguish between cheating trucking companies and determined terrorists
What do lightweight boxers and truckers have in common? Both have to make weight. If a boxer worries he is too heavy, he typically exercises in a sauna while wearing a sweatsuit. After all, failure to come in below weight means forefeiture of the match and appearance fees. No such penalty exists, however, for truckers, many of whom, Florida officials have found, carry loads heavier than the law allows. Discerning whether the extra weight is the result of a cheating shipping company or a devious terrorist is emerging as an important security issue.
Take the example of the Port of Miami-Dade. Each day, 2,500 trucks leave the port; half are over the weight limits imposed to protect roads and other motorists. Since 2003, all cargo ships entering the United States have to submit their manifests — the record of what’s inside a cargo container and how much it weighs — to U.S. Customs and Border Protection twenty-four hours before being loaded at a foreign port, but responsibility for weighing the trucks that carry the containers off the pier rests with local transportation authorities. The few inspections that are carried out are infrequent and, at least so far as terrortism is concerned, nearly useless. According to one official, weight discrepencies up to 1000 pounds are usually overlooked and chalked up to human error — far too insensitive to detect a bomb.
Without any unifying guidance, procedures for verifying weight vary. Port Everglades relies on terminal operators to use their own scales, although no agency is set up to monitor compliance. Port of Miami started random weigh-ins last year, but only because truckers complained of being forced to carry overweight and thus illegal loads. As for the Florida Department of Transportation, its random inspections with portable scales account for only a fraction of the trucks on the road, reports the Miami Herald. The department’s Miami field office in 2005 weighed only 1,841 trucks, flagging 1,502 for being overweight.
-read more in Steve Harrison’s Miami Herald report
