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Senators approve mandatory chains law

Blizzard conditions like these, at Lookout Pass in January 2006, can make for risky driving for big-rig drivers. Spun-out semitrucks can back up highway traffic for miles, Shoshone County's sheriff said Thursday. (File / The Spokesman-Review)
Betsy Z. Russell Staff writer
Blizzard conditions like these, at Lookout Pass in January 2006, can make for risky driving for big-rig drivers. Spun-out semitrucks can back up highway traffic for miles, Shoshone County's sheriff said Thursday. (File / The Spokesman-Review)

BOISE – Jackknifed semitrucks have closed North Idaho mountain passes too many times, creating huge backups, disrupting commerce and even endangering lives, law enforcement officers told an Idaho Senate committee Thursday.

It’s time for the state to do something about it, they said, and the senators agreed, unanimously approving legislation to give Idaho its first mandatory chain-up law. The measure would apply only to big, interstate trucks on Lookout and Fourth of July passes on I-90, and on Lolo Pass on Highway 12.

Idaho State Police Capt. Clark Rollins said those passes are often closed by jackknifed big rigs in snowy weather. “If we have a critical patient coming from the Silver Valley, and Fourth of July is blocked with spun-out trucks, there’s no way to get ‘em there,” Rollins told the Senate Transportation Committee.

Shoshone County Sheriff Chuck Reynalds said traffic backs up to Wallace – 12 miles away – when Lookout Pass gets clogged with semitruck spinouts.

“I’m the first line of defense,” Reynalds told the panel. “I have two people on graveyard; a lot of times, they’re on the pass.”

A mandatory chain-up law for the big rigs, he said, “just makes sense.”

Sen. Joyce Broadsword, R-Sagle, sponsored the bill, SB 1379, which now will move to the full Senate for consideration. The effort comes four years after a broader mandatory chain-up bill for all drivers was roundly rejected by the Legislature. Idaho now has no mandatory chain-up laws.

Sen. Jim Hammond, R-Post Falls, said, “You want to fix the most immediate part of that problem first, and I believe this does that.”

The bill exempts local logging trucks and other local trucks that fall into a category already exempt from certain trucking regulations.

Skip Smyser, lobbyist for the Idaho Trucking Association, said his group supports the bill and would support removing the exemptions and making it apply to all big rigs. But Rollins said local trucks aren’t the ones that typically spin out; it’s interstate traffic, he said.

Broadsword said local truckers know to put on winter tires, but some interstate trucking firms send their trucks out west with regular highway tires and drivers who are unprepared for the conditions.

The three passes were selected – even though there are others where similar measures could help – because they have sufficient areas for truck chain-up pullouts and signs, Rollins said.

Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, said, “We’re going to have to do this a piece at a time, and I think this is a good first step.”

Montana, Washington and Oregon already have mandatory chain-up laws.