Hester Inc. Was Ordered by FMCSA to Close Shop

Trucking company, Hester Inc., of Fayette, Ala., has been told to cease operations by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). In March, a Hester Inc. driver crossed the median on interstate hitting a van that resulted on 11 road accident casualties.

The order was unobtrusively issued by the agency, in late May, after conducting a compliance review within days of the accident.

On April 5, the agency issued a proposed “unsatisfactory” and warned Hester Inc., that the company would be shut down if they don't take the necessary steps to bolster its safety rating to "conditional" or "satisfactory" within 60 days.

The order to cease issued by Darrell L. Rubin, field administrator for FMCSA’s Southern Service Center at Atlanta, became effective June 5. Hester apparently didn't heed to the agency's warning.

The trucking company was fined $13,950 for the violations, but it repudiated the payments.

The FMCSA found that Hester is already dispatching driver before it even receives the results of their per-employment drug test – which is a complete violation on the trucking company's part – letting on the road a driver who had been suspended after a roadside inspection and letting drivers go beyond the 11-hour limits imposed by federal law.

Immediately following the accident, Hester's SafeStat records have been removed from the FMCSA website, but reporters zeroed in on Hester's March 26 driver safety evaluation of 88.4 – which is 13.4 points above what the agency considers deficient.

However under current criteria, the FMCSA would not ordinarily have carried out a compliance review because of the deficient score.

Under those criteria, the FMCSA will conduct a compliance review on a carrier due to the following reasons: if it is deficient in at least three of the four Safety Assessment Areas (accident, driver, vehicle, safety management); if it is deficient in two areas when one of those areas is accidents; or if the carrier had a score of 95 or above in the crash area.

According to the FMCSA, Hester did not meet any of those criteria and, normally, it would not have been targeted for a compliance review. Nonetheless, FMCSA criteria do call for carriers found unsatisfactory in only one safety assessment area to be constantly observed for safety performance, including scheduling the carrier’s vehicles for roadside inspections using the agency’s Inspection Selection Software.

At any rate, under the agency’s imminent national safety enforcement program CSA 2010, any carrier discovered unsatisfactory in even one of seven outlined assessment areas are to be targeted by FMCSA for an intervention to address the specific problem.

A full compliance review could be conducted, if intervention measures do not work.

The FMCSA criteria clearly states, if Hester, or any other carrier for that matter, can't make the grade during a compliance review, the carrier can be put out of service.

In the past 30 months, FMCSA records show that the agency has conducted 194 driver inspections on Hester drivers with 21 being put out of service for logbook violations, exceeding the 11-hour driving limit or the 14-hour on-duty limit.

In an FMCSA data reviewed by The Trucker, Hester Inc.’s 10.8 percent out-of-service rate for driver inspections would be regarded high among carriers.