An X-Ray Vision

Ignorance is definitely not bliss. Not when it comes to trucking in 2002, and especially not for drivers. It’s the guys at the wheel who sit at the leading edge of the changes our industry is going through, and I have the feeling that they’re not being kept up to speed. If ever there was a way to create a shortage of trust among drivers, this is it. Keep them ignorant and drivers’ well-developed sense of victimhood will just grow.

These days, in fact, most of us feel a little or even a lot ignorant of what’s really going on in the business. I struggle mightily. But many of us have access to information that drivers and most owner-operators just don’t have. Association newsletters, contacts within a transport ministry, perhaps even hired consultants. Drivers, on the other hand, have little more than a few magazines, the odd truckstop notice board, and the CB radio to keep them up to date with the news.

As evidence I offer the array of correspondence my colleagues and I have had over the last year, particularly.

At Today’s Trucking and our sister magazine, highwaySTAR, we get lots of mail from the driver and owner-operator audience. It usually covers the kinds of complaints I’ve heard since the 1970s, about rates and roads and all that predictable stuff. But the editorial mailbox is routinely full these days, and with only the slightest analysis, the messages show worry and concern about the future in a way they never have before. I find it troubling.

Typical of this new phenomenon is some e-mail correspondence I’ve had recently with Ben Smoke, an Ontario owner-operator. He, apparently like many others, was concerned about a possible radiation hazard at border crossings to the United States. Citing the routine use of “X-ray machines” by U.S. Customs in Buffalo and Detroit in recent months, he said he had written to various government and local authorities asking about the long-term effects on drivers exposed to what he assumes are potentially dangerous radiation levels. So far, and God only knows why not, nobody has responded.

There’s a simple explanation, and we actually wrote about it earlier this year, both in Today’s Trucking and in highwaySTAR. What Ben assumes are X-ray machines are in fact vehicle scanners that use harmless, low-level gamma rays to check cargo without having to physically inspect it. Given Ben’s fears, it’s useful to go over the ground we covered a few months back.

The most common gamma-ray scanners, called the Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System (VACIS), are made by a San Diego outfit called Science Applications International (www.saic.com). VACIS is a new technological approach to the need for non-invasive inspection of large objects, like trailers and cargo containers. It was originally developed to make it easier for the U.S. Customs Service to find illegal drugs. VACIS can and is being used to find everything from explosives to illegal aliens, and not just at international border crossings. Florida, for example, bought two mobile scanning units to inspect trucks entering the state from across the northern border for drugs, illegal plants, animals, and pests.

Manitoba’s tax department has been using a similar system at the West Hawk Lake truck inspection facility to find contraband tobacco entering the province from Ontario. Drivers are asked to drive the truck off the scale and around to the scanner for a closer look. A scan takes somewhere between seven and 15 minutes. “We can inspect a vehicle if we have reason to believe there might be some contraband on board. The scanners just speed up the process,” Peter Murphy, manager of special investigations for Manitoba Taxation, told us. “If the driver refuses to give consent, we’ll get a warrant if we need to.”

We talked to an owner-operator with a household-goods mover whose vehicle had been scanned at West Hawk Lake, and he wasn’t happy. First, he had no choice in submitting to something he felt was perilously near to being an illegal search; and second, he didn’t know what was in his trailer. Could he be held responsible if the tax boys found some sort of contraband?

“We wouldn’t have held the driver accountable unless we could have proven that he knew about the cargo,” Murphy insisted. “Like, if we had found his fingerprints on the cartons inside the cases of cigarettes.”

In this post-9/11 world, we can expect similar electronic inspection procedures at sensitive locations like container ports and trans-shipping facilities as well international ports of entry, and even a few truck inspection stations. Drivers will eventually get used to them, but it’s easy to see why they would be concerned if they were not told in advance what to expect. If the authorities aren’t informing drivers properly, the rest of us had better pick up the fight on our own. We’ll do our part. But it may be time for you to add another bulletin board in your drivers’ room.