September 27, 2011 in Idaho

ITD drops police escort rule for megaloads

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BOISE – The first Nickel Bros. megaload on scenic Highway 12 in north-central Idaho, which crossed into Montana late Monday night, traveled without any state police escorts – and the Idaho Transportation Department now says it won’t require the police escorts for any of the company’s eight remaining oversized transports on the route.

Idaho State Police troopers traveling both in front and in back of each load were key points of previous permits issued for megaloads on Highway 12; the companies paid for the troopers’ overtime.

Idaho Transportation Department spokesman Adam Rush said, “It was determined an ISP escort was not available, and upon reflection determined not to be necessary.” Instead, he said, emergency radio coordination was delegated to an emergency medical technician traveling with the shipments.

Opponents of the giant equipment transports on the route are steamed at the change, and say the state trooper escorts for the oversize loads – which are wide enough to block both lanes of travel, creating a rolling roadblock – have been described all along as key to safe transport of the big loads on the narrow, winding highway.

“To us this is a major concern of public safety and it’s a major violation of what ITD and ISP has consistently told the public for 15 months,” said Linwood Laughy, a Highway 12 resident who’s been a leading opponent of the giant transports.

The biggest proposal for megaloads on the route comes from Imperial Oil/ExxonMobil, which wants to run more than 200 loads of Korean-made oil field equipment headed for the Alberta oil sands over Highway 12 to Montana, then north to Canada. Exxon has run only one of those loads so far, a test module designed to match the tallest, widest, longest and heaviest of its loads.

In April, that test load struck a guy wire for a utility line on its first night of travel, knocking out power to two Idaho towns and leading to a delay of more than two weeks.

Rush said the ISP troopers played an important traffic-control role when the route was closed in that incident, but he said Idaho Transportation Department workers have authority to close roads in emergencies even without police present.

Gary MacFarlane of Friends of the Clearwater, a Moscow conservation group that unsuccessfully tried to contest the Nickel Bros. loads, said his group’s petition was rejected on the basis that earlier hearings on the Exxon loads had settled all the issues regarding megaload transports on Highway 12. But those hearings included assurances of police escorts, he said.

“Obviously we’re looking into that from a legal perspective, there’s no question about that,” MacFarlane said. “Is it a shell game or a bait and switch, or some of both? It’s not being honest with the citizens or with the public.”

Jeff McCord, spokesman for Nickel Bros., which is hauling the nine big loads of evaporator equipment to a Weyerhaeuser pulp mill in northern Alberta, said the firm was perfectly willing to pay for the ISP escorts, but they weren’t available. “They were worried about their own resources,” he said. “We want to be in complete compliance, no matter what the requirements are.”

Four comments on this story so far. Add yours!

• 

  oneanddone on September 27 at 4:55 p.m.

  Wow! An Idaho govt agency that breaks its word. Go figure. It’s all just more BS from the Boise Boys. This is a govt that would sell its citizens down the river for a song - entitled “Business Uber Alles.”

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  The_Seer on September 27 at 5:59 p.m.

  The troopers needed to be freed up in order to escort college football coaches on and off the field.

  What is up with that? I watched a game last week and a coach had EIGHT cops standing behind him in a post-game on-field interview.

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  lowtechmaster on September 27 at 6:32 p.m.

  Another reason Idaho is called HO-HO-HO!! Those coaches really need protection, but the citizens along the route do not!!

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  RedCedar on September 27 at 6:46 p.m.

  I don’t know if the trooper escorts are necessary or not. Most likely they are not. On the other hand, there seems to be enough dishonesty to go around on both sides here. The environmentalists’ real issue is that they don’t want megaloads on the highway, and that (at least for many of them) they want to stop the environmentally-destructive projects that these loads are a part of. ISP escorts don’t address either of those real issues, so suing over that is just a way of throwing sand in the works. On the other hand, if IDOT promised ISP escorts back in the beginning, and has now made the administrative decision that they’re not needed, one has to wonder if they planned to do it that way all along.

  It also occurs to me that, since a commissioned LEO makes a pretty expensive flashing light, perhaps the real reason for the ISP escorts was to deal with the massive protests that the environmentalists promised. Now that protests aren’t really happening, except for a bit of demonstrating in Moscow, they can do away with the ISP escorts.

  What IDOT does need to do, however, is charge a high price for the overweight permits. The trucking companies are more than willing to pay, and probably pay more than they currently are, in order to use this very convenient short-cut through Idaho. There’s nothing in the law that says the state has to let them use the road cheaply. By the time they’re done, US 12 is going to need a complete repaving, which it probably wouldn’t have needed for many more years without those big loads. Worse, the local economy will suffer as tourists who don’t want to be stuck in a traffic jam in God’s Country, avoid the Lochsa and Clearwater. The permit fees should be high enough to fund a complete repair and repaving of the highway once the heavy hauling is done, and also should somehow return money to the local economy, perhaps by grants to the highway departments of the counties and cities impacted by the hauling. Most people are more willing to put up with some inconvenience if they feel they’re getting a piece of the action.