Truckers Face Lengthy Detours After Floods Close Stretch of I-15
This story appears in the Sept. 15 print edition of Transport Topics.
Nearly 50 miles of Interstate 15, a critical western freight artery, was closed last week after floods severely damaged the highway north of Las Vegas, forcing thousands of truckers to take costly detours from Southern California to Montana.
Torrential rains on Sept. 8 triggered a flash flood that buried part of the highway in mud and wiped out a section of roadbed near where I-15 briefly crosses into Arizona before turning north into Utah.
At many as 5,000 trucks a day may be forced onto narrow rural highways due to the closure of the I-15 stretch that runs from Nevada and Arizona into Utah, said Kevin Kitchen, a regional spokesman for the Utah Department of Transportation.
“A lot of refrigerated freight especially [runs] from the bread basket of Southern California up toward the Mid-West and Northeast,” he said.
Trucks are being detoured onto U.S. 93, a two-lane highway heading north from Las Vegas.
“That’s a much slower path and that’s now the main corridor for one of our primary lanes in our Western network,” said Sam Scott, president of the national and regional divisions of Salt Lake City-based C.R. England. The company ranks No. 20 on the Transport Topics list of the top 100 for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.
“It’s a significant cost increase per load both in driver time and in equipment downtime, not to mention the fuel cost,” Scott said.
And the delays are playing havoc with driver hours-of-service restrictions, carriers said.
“We just have to roll with it, really,” Scott said, adding, “We can only run as long as we can legally. This certainly does have an impact on productivity.”
The interstate stretches from San Diego to Montana, allowing truckers to move freight from the Mexican border to Canada.
The closed area lies between mile markers 64 and 112 — between the Nevada towns of Glendale and Mesquite — northeast of Las Vegas.
Nevada transportation officials said last week that they hoped to open one lane in each direction by Sept. 14, but truckers will still be subject to detours.
“Once it does open, commercial vehicles will still be restricted going northbound,” said Meg Ragonese, spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Transportation. “And that will continue for a week or more, so essentially, commercial vehicles traveling northbound will still be detouring via U.S. 93,” Ragonese said.
At Godfrey Trucking, another Salt Lake City-based carrier, the 77-mile detour is probably costing $1.40 per mile in added driver, fuel and equipment costs, said Mike Williams, vice president of operations.
“It is our biggest route. We probably put close to 60% of our fleet down into there,” he said of the I-15 corridor. The detour “adds probably a half a day at least [on Los Angeles runs]. It’s quite a burden.”
UPS Inc. said that its Freight division is dealing with some of the traffic delays but working with local customers in the immediate areas of the road closure for their freight deliveries. UPS said compliance with HOS hasn’t been an issue.
The company, which tops the TT for-hire list, runs vehicles powered by liquefied natural gas and by diesel along the corridor.
“The LNG tractors from Las Vegas and Beaver, Utah, fuel at their local fueling stations [and] drive to a mid-point in Caliente, Nevada, to transfer loads and return. There hasn’t been any issue for fuel,” Susan Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for UPS, said.
Dave Berry, vice president of Swift Transportation Co. in Phoenix, ranked No. 6 on the TT for-hire list, said: “This is the wide open West where there are few roads and no reasonable alternative routes. Until the road is repaired, truckers and motorists will face long delays and many extra miles as they take the detour.”
Last week, traffic clogged U.S. 93, turning into “a parking lot,” said Paul Enos, CEO of the Nevada Motor Transport Association.
“I’m getting reports of seven
to nine-and-a-half hour delays,” he said.
The traffic tie-ups were for trucks coming off U.S. 93 onto two smaller highways, Nevada’s 319 and Utah’s 56, on their way back and forth to I-15 in Cedar City, Utah, said Kitchen of the Utah DOT. At one point last week, he said, the backup was 20 miles long.
To help truckers cope with the emergency, Utah lifted the ban against triple trailers on some smaller highways, Kitchen said.
And last week, Utah was sending “incident management” teams into Nevada to help truckers and police there with traffic backups, caused in part by large trucks coming off U.S. 93 and having to negotiate turns onto small rural highway intersections not designed for such traffic.
Scott of C.R. England said that in an effort to avoid the small highways around Cedar City now clogged with truck traffic, the carrier is routing the majority of its trucks out of Salt Lake City via U.S. 6 that connects to U.S. 50 in Nevada — but that too is becoming crowded.
