tieguy
Banned
I assume you are being sarcastic because we got a whole batch of drivers that are former package car jackrabbits that are now feeder jackrabbits and will hop into any shizbox that starts without so much as a look at a pretrip. As far as bad axles, try and find any minor cracks in equipment covered in years of dirt and grease. Years back we had a batch of new Fords,now made by Sterling, that had bad axles from the factory. The whole group of them had to be tagged.
My money is on the "hot loads , gotta go" bet. Happens all the time here. Why would it be any different anywhere else.
You guys make assumptions that the sup rushed the driver when my experience is that very few drivers can do a complete and thorough pretrip and our audits show drivers routinely miss DOT required items.Even with a sup riding with the driver the sup generally does not have the driver call out everything he is pre-trippiing. So a look in the general direction of the equipment is probably determined to be his checking the steering components. Axles and U joints are not always easy to catch on a pre-trip due to the reasons you list. My question would be what indication did they have while driving. If its an axle then you would think it gave off some vibration before it broke. Are we sure it was an axle? They usually do not break. If he had steering issues then it sounds more like he blew a steering tire. The other question is why the fire? I've seen some accidents where drivers flipped and rolled equipment and had no fire.