A Training Course That Delivers

Hazards fill the road in front of Richard Ordonez.

A small child makes quick, heart-stopping leaps into the path of his postal truck. A basketball keeps bouncing out from the curb, forcing Ordonez to suddenly hit the brakes. Runaway garbage cans abound in this cul-de-sac of horrors.

It adds up to a mail carrier’s nightmare. All that’s missing is a dog bite to the backside.

“Stressful,” Ordonez sighs after stepping out of the small white vehicle. And this from a man who spent seven years driving a mail truck and now oversees all postal operations from Glendale to the Antelope Valley. Fortunately for Ordonez, the child is made of cardboard, and a machine pushes the bouncing ball into the street.

The artificial perils are features of the new “driver confidence course” for carriers in a remote paved lot nestled in the hills around the U.S. Postal Service’s Santa Clarita Processing and Distribution Center.

With an audience of several dozen area postal officials watching Friday, Ordonez took the first trip around the training course, the second of its kind in the nation.

“It familiarizes drivers with the fact that things can just pop out,” said Cathey Sinai, senior safety specialist in Santa Clarita. “A lot of the accidents we have result from misjudged clearances and failure to get by overgrown shrubbery.”

When training gets underway in the next several weeks, instructors will sit next to trainees and coach them on proper techniques. The highlight for the instructors figures to be clicking a remote control device to make objects fly into the roadway.

Each day about 5,000 letter carriers drive their routes in Ordonez’s Van Nuys District, one of nine in the state. Most use Grumman Long Life trucks with seven specially designed mirrors to make up for the lack of a back window. In these tank-like vehicles, maneuvering is an art and parallel parking a pipe dream.

In the fiscal year ending last September, Van Nuys District drivers had 372 accidents, or about 19 for every 1 million miles traveled, officials said. That was down from 413 the previous year.

By comparison, the Long Beach District had about 21 accidents per 1 million miles in fiscal 1997, and the largely rural San Diego District had 13.

Seeking a means of improving road safety, Ordonez and others designed the course, which boasts a variety of curb layouts, lane stripes, traffic lights and mailboxes that simulate street conditions. The layout expanded on the original course in Phoenix, which opened in 1996.

During development, hand-delivery features were designed as a complement to the street hazards. In the coming months, trainees will park their trucks and walk through a faux neighborhood, complete with street signs and building facades, to drop off mail. Lurking in the shrubbery will be a man-made man’s best friend, offering an artificial--but still menacing--bark.

District postal officials, who will send trainees to the course for two hours of experience for each vehicle they will drive, gave it rave reviews after Friday’s debut.

“They did a good job of creating a controlled environment, where the hazards are there but not the same exact stress of the real situation,” said Dan Scofano, customer service manager in Glendale.

In addition to helping the self-insured Postal Service minimize accidents, the course will live up to its name and boost the confidence of recruits, Ordonez said.

“Being a letter carrier is a very difficult job,” he said. “When you’re new, you need something much more intensive than just riding along on a real street.”

Christi Bell, acting postmaster in Canoga Park, said the course should help her weed potential demolition derby drivers from the postal ranks. Watching the bouncing ball pop out yet again, she said: “This will show people what they’re up against.”