121 Cited for Safety Failures : Garbage Trucks Find a Surprise at 3 Dumps

Some garbage truck drivers in San Diego County received a nasty surprise when they tried to unload their cargo at county and city dumps Tuesday. California Highway Patrol inspectors were lying in wait at the dumps, passing out citations as swiftly as they could write them.

In eight hours, three inspection teams--at the Miramar landfill on Mercury Road in San Diego, Otay landfill on Otay Valley Road near Chula Vista and Sycamore landfill on Mast Boulevard near Santee--inspected 171 trucks for safety and issued citations to 121 of them. Inspectors took 34 trucks out of service, forcing the owners to fix them at the dump or have them towed to a repair shop. Both private and city trucks were inspected.

Many of the citations were only warnings. The penalty for others will be decided by a court.

The inspection came as a complete surprise to most of the truck owners, who had received no warning, said CHP Officer Bill Martin, who was performing inspections at Miramar.

“The ones that we got in the morning, they had no idea what was coming. Of course, as the day goes on they start to figure it out, but then it’s too late to do any repairs,” Martin said.

The Highway Patrol keeps the inspection quiet so as to “catch the trucks just as they are out on the road,” he said.

This was the first time that a check has been done at all three dumps at once, Martin said. In December, when the CHP did a daylong inspection at Miramar, “we started to notice that they all disappeared as the day went on,” Martin said.

By checking all three landfills at once, the CHP prevented owners from rerouting their problem trucks away from the checkpoints. However, because of the large number of trucks using the dumps, the CHP inspected only a random sample.

Brakes accounted for the greatest number of citations, followed closely by steering problems and missing lug nuts, Martin said. “We had one truck whose front brakes were completely shot,” he said.

Martin said that the high citation rate was not unexpected, since constant use and heavy loads make garbage trucks prone to breakdowns.

“The more runs they make and the more time they keep the trucks out on the road, the more money they’re going to make. It’s only natural that they try to squeeze them,” he said.

Harvey Heaton, CHP spokesman, said the method for paying garbage collectors exacerbates the maintenance problem. “Most of these guys have a route that is supposed to take eight hours, but if they can finish it faster, they get that time off. There is a constant temptation to overload the trucks so as to make fewer runs in a day,” Heaton said.

Martin said the sheer size of the trucks makes even minor violations a cause for concern. “When you get one of these suckers loaded with (tons of) trash and the brakes go out at an intersection . . . well, you’re going to flatten a couple cars,” he said.

Martin said inspectors met with little antagonism from drivers, and those who were waiting to have their trucks inspected seemed unperturbed.

“It’s the owner and not the driver that has to pay the fines,” he said.

Officials of several of the largest private trash collection services said that the inspections had caused no delays.

Ron Graham, a spokesman for the City of San Diego’s Refuse Collection Division, said the inspections “presented no difficulties for the city.”

“We have a very thorough maintenance program, so we usually sustain very few violations,” he said. There was no breakdown on the number of citations given to city and private haulers.

CHP has five inspection officers in the county, so Martin, who normally works in Orange County, was called in.

Martin said CHP inspection officers in Orange County have monthly meetings with the local Solid Waste Assn. to emphasize safety issues and that the meetings have “gone a long way to solve the problem.”

Heaton said there are no plans to implement such a program in San Diego. “We just hope that all these violations will convince people to start servicing the vehicles,” he said.