Postal Training Course Hopes to Deliver Safety

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 him to hit the brakes. Runaway garbage cans abound in this cul-de-sac-of-horrors.

It adds up to a mail carrier’s nightmare, with the only thing missing being 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 in Ventura, and who now oversees all postal operations in a vast region including Glendale, Burbank and the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.

Fortunately for Ordonez, however, 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” 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 looking on 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 young trainees and coach them on proper techniques. The highlight for the instructors figures to be clicking a remote control to make objects fly into the roadway.

Each day, about 5,000 letter carriers drive the Van Nuys District--one of nine districts in the state, Ordonez said. Most use Gruman 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 but a pipe dream.

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

By comparison, the Long Beach District had about 21 accidents per million miles in fiscal 1997, and the largely rural San Diego District had 13. Accidents include anything from a fender bender to an injury collision.

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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 typical street conditions. The layout expanded on that of the original course in Phoenix, which opened in late 1996.

During development, hand-delivery obstacles were added to complement 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 new trainees to the course for two hours of training 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 new recruits, Ordonez predicted.

“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.”