TEMECULA, CALIF. The California Highway Patrol this week boosted its hours for checking truck traffic at a key inland weigh station north of San Diego, helping enforce cross-border trucking rules that apply to Mexican truckers operating here under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The facility is once again checking trucks 24 hours each day.
 | 
Michael James - Transport Topics |
| Liz Arbogast, commerecial vehicle inspection specialist with the California Highway patrol, monitors northbound commercial truck traffic on the scales at the Rainbow Inspection Facility, Temecula, Calif. |
That Rainbow Inspection Facility on Interstate 15 at Temecula, Calif. is just beyond the northern reaches of a limited zone in which cross-border commercial trucks can operate under NAFTA. So, opening it for extra hours allows the CHP to stop trucks that might otherwise move past that facility when it is closed, in an attempt to haul freight deeper into California than the rules allow.
The extent to which trucks operated by Mexican drivers can reach into the United States for freight business is one of the sensitive issues for U.S. trucking interests, as U.S. carriers are not allowed the same freedom of movement inside Mexico.
Lt. Gary Smith, the facility commander, said the Rainbow station about 50 miles north of San Diego was open around the clock earlier this year. However, staff levels there fell for several months as the CHP temporarily assigned some officers elsewhere or took on extra work for a while to handle the Democratic National Convention in nearby Los Angeles during August. So Rainbow was running only two shifts for a while until it could schedule enough officers again to check trucks all day and night.
Smith said Rainbow actually checks on more trucks than the CHP’s inspection facility right on the Mexico border at Otay Mesa. Rainbow’s truck totals this year have been as low as 49,459 in August but up to 83,422 last April. It saw 76,677 moves through its scales during September; of those, it pulled more than a thousand aside for close-up inspections.
As the trucks stream in double file past the weigh station, inspectors in glass booths scan computer readouts of weight per axle, while also checking for such things as safety of cargo tie-downs, cracks in truck wheels and tire condition, or the date on CHP-issued stickers that show when the truck last went through a CHP close-up look.
