Welcome To The Jungle, Part One
On the recent collision in Austin
This past Thursday night in Austin, Texas, a collision took place on Interstate 35 that has seen 5 people killed and another dozen sent to hospital, many in critical condition.
https://www.kxan.com/news/at-least-four-killed-in-multi-vehicle-crash-on-interstate-35-in-north-austin/
According to first responders, the five people who died at the crash near Parmer and Howard Lane included three adults, one child and one infant. The other 11 people who were injured included:
four adults with critical, life-threatening injuries
four adults with minor injuries
one child with potentially life-threatening injuries
two children with minor injuries
As the father of two young daughters, this incident pains me to read about - the lives cut short, the anguish the families and friends of these folks that might never be assuaged.
And then we find out about the party who was found to have caused this.
Solomun Weldekeal Araya, 37, was charged with five counts of intoxication manslaughter with a vehicle and two counts of intoxication assault with vehicle involving serious bodily injury in connection with the crash, according to the Austin Police Department.
Police sources confirmed with KXAN the person arrested was the driver of a semi-truck hauling for Amazon. The driver involved in this incident is not an Amazon employee.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/bystanders-help-after-fatal-17-vehicle-crash/
Edgar Viera, who was at a nearby store and heard the crash, claimed an 18-wheeler was going 80 mph and did not stop for half a mile as it hit other vehicles.
The exact speed of the 18-wheeler is not yet known, and Austin-Travis County EMS told KXAN the scene spread across about 1/10 of a mile on the interstate near Parmer and Howard Lane.
Viera said traffic was already completely stopped when the 18-wheeler crashed into another truck, which slowed it down.
Witnesses described seeing cars in shambles and the injured lying on the road.
“We decided just to run and just start helping out the people,” Viera said. “We saw cars smashed in together. We saw babies passed away. We saw people passed away.”
KXAN reached out to the semi-truck company involved in the crash. The owner of ZBN Transport LLC said Friday afternoon there’s been no contact with its semi-truck driver. The company told KXAN Araya has been with the ZBN Transport LLC for about four months, and there have not been any prior issues with him.
There is a trend in the trucking industry as of late where large companies such as Amazon or FedEx or even large trucking outfits are subcontracting out their work to these small, no name companies, and often enough arrange for these contractors through load brokerages who are maybe not very good at vetting the carriers they find on load boards.
Apparently Mr Araya had already been intercepted by police for speeding once before, 63 mph in a 30 zone. I’m not sure about how Texas law works, but in many jurisdictions, speeding at double the posted limit incurs at very least an instant temporary license suspension.
Amazon has a history of using such low quality small time carriers, many of whom have significantly questionable safety records.
A CBS report from this past December about Amazon reveals some patterns -
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-trucking-contractors-have-higher-rates-of-safety-violations/
A CBS News analysis of federal safety data revealed Amazon contractors primarily in the company's "middle-mile" delivery network had monthly violation rates — such as speeding and texting while driving — that were usually double those of carriers who didn't transport for Amazon. The analysis examined six years of monthly Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) unsafe driving rates and found the average rates of carriers who shipped for Amazon were at least 89% higher in every month.
Miller said the large patchwork of contractors Amazon uses for "middle-mile" transport poses challenges to ensuring a uniform culture of safety.
"The more you are essentially having your freight hauled by hundreds, if not thousands of small young firms, that makes it much more difficult to ensure those firms are operating safely versus a more - what we call strategic procurement model, where you may have a few very large carriers that you work with that handle a lot of freight," said Miller.
In the past two years, at least 57 people have died in more than four dozen crashes involving federally regulated carriers shipping for Amazon, according to FMCSA data, though the data does not indicate who was at fault in these incidents. The FMCSA produces a crash involvement score for carriers, but it is not public.
Amazon are not alone in using networks of dodgy load brokers and trucking contractors.
In another Texas incident that took place in February of 2021, a contractor pulling a FedEx trailer similarly to Mr Araya slammed into stopped traffic in Fort Worth, killing two people.
From an investigation into that incident from WFAA in Fort Worth -
FedEx contracts a load through a dodgy Uzbek load broker (ummm, why are guys in Uzbekistan involved in American supply chains?) who then sells it onward to one of these no-name carriers that happened to employ a migrant from Haiti named Jean Marie Saint-Lot. Mr Saint-Lot admits in the investigation that he took a CDL course through a school in Florida that only lasted three weeks and didn’t teach him anything about driving in winter conditions.
When you watch this video, it is revealed that as traffic is piling up in other lanes, and the road is clearly icy, Mr Saint-Lot increases the speed of his truck before crashing into stopped traffic. Perhaps common sense and physics are not components of modern CDL training; in the name of not killing people, maybe they should be.
I’m not sure where Mr Araya of the first incident is from, or what his immigration status is, but I have seen speculation online that he is either Eritrean or Somalian, which raises the question if he arrived in America via a program under the Biden administration. Like many other government programs, it was a ‘solution’ looking for a problem, and appears to be behind many of the incidents on American roads as of late.
I wrote about how a Biden administration task force is implicated in the disturbing rise of truck involved collisions and incidents on our roads over the past couple of years for my friends at The Blaze.
https://www.theblaze.com/align/highway-to-hell-mass-influx-of-foreign-born-truckers-cause-carnage-on-american-roads
Late in 2021, the White House — then occupied by the cognitively declining and dubiously elected Joseph R. Biden — put out a document called “The Biden Harris Administration Trucking Action Plan to Strengthen America’s Trucking Workforce.”
In this plan, the White House let slip what was really going on:
“At the same time, the industry reports historic demand for its services. Reflecting that demand, wages for employed drivers in all trucking segments have increased 7-12% in the last year alone, but employment in some segments is still below pre-pandemic levels.”
It is hard to ignore the implication here: The Biden administration (no doubt encouraged by American Trucking Association lobbyists), was not happy that truck driver pay had increased. Nor did they seem to believe that the market was moving fast enough to correct this bidding up of wages.
An April 2022 Fact Sheet update that has since been scrubbed from the White House website included a stunning figure that ought to have raised some eyebrows. Thanks to “cutting red tape,” the DOT helped states “more than double new commercial driver’s license issuances in January and February 2022 compared to January and February 2021. States have issued more than 876,000 CDLs since January 2021."
Suppose we accept for a moment the ATA’s unlikely claim that there’s a shortage of 80,000 drivers and that that shortage could grow as high as 160,000 by 2030.
Why then did the Biden administration claim to deliver more than 10 times the number of the supposed "shortage" that the ATA repeats ad nauseam?
Moreover, where did they find all of these extra drivers, who were clearly not drawn from the existing pool of CDL holders?
Another group asking these questions is trucker advocacy organization American Truckers United, which has been digging into the data on all of the excess CDLs produced over the past five years, some possibly due to the COVID demand increase, some through the legitimate parts of Biden’s plan, but most not.
Co-founder Shannon Everett and his team have been combing through state DMV records. Their number-crunching revealed that 10 states and Puerto Rico had somehow managed to issue over three and a half times the number of CDLs as all of the other 40 states combined.
To take just two examples, Oregon dumped 98,872 truck drivers into the system in 2022, a staggering 77 times the normal yearly number. South Carolina counted 77,580 new truckers in 2021.
“Is it even possible to test, train, and qualify 43 times your normal throughput?” asked the ATU on X. “Did FedEx and UPS move all of their operations to South Carolina?”
These increases in CDL numbers are simply too high for existing truck-driving schools and technical or community colleges to have accommodated.
Everett and his team have a different explanation: Most of these drivers have been insourced from other countries, with very little in the way of vetting.
These hires also took advantage of a change quietly made in the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016, when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a very curious memorandum ordering the DOT and police to stop enforcing the federal regulation requiring CDL drivers to be proficient in English.
Why drop the perfectly sensible English requirement? One clue may be found in the 2023 Biden administration update on the Trucking Action Plan, which announced that resources would be directed to “increase [the] capacity to train veterans and their family members [and] individuals from underserved and refugee communities.”
Similar language appears in the following year’s update, which includes a pledge to “increase the training opportunities for candidates from rural, refugee, and underserved communities.”
The ATU has also found a disturbing correlation between the massive spike in CDLs issued and the steady increase in truck-involved collisions and fatalities. This time period has also seen a massive rise in freight fraud, where trailers are stolen, dodgy load brokers fail to pay the truckers who moved freight, or shady trucking companies hold loads for ransom.
Tellingly, the original "Trucking Action Plan" from 2021 failed to mention refugees or migrants at all. Nonetheless, the increased presence of foreign drivers — either “refugees” or simply in the country illegally — on American roads is clear evidence that the Biden administration made good on its promise.
For more information on American Truckers United and the information they have been analyzing from the FMCSA and state DOT/DMVs, you ought to listen to my interview with co-founder Shannon Everett, which I released two weeks ago and has now been downloaded nearly 1200 times.
The Replacement of American Truckers
The Voice Of GO(r)D podcast is extremely honored to have had the opportunity to introduce to you Mr Shannon Everett, of a legitimate trucker advocacy organization called American Truckers United that has been crunching data on the flooding of America’s trucking market with foreign ‘drivers’, and how our political class is allowing and actively encouragi…
I have since discovered that the NGO-Foundation-Non Profit complex, the same types of people who flooded Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania with Haitians, are also up to their eyeballs in replacing American truckers with refugees.
What a cosmic coincidence that one of these organizations is headquartered in Austin, the site of this horrific wreck which captures so much of what is going on here.
https://www.globalimpactinitiative.com/cdl-training-for-refugees
It should not be surprise that NGO gremlins are referencing the same old driver shortage lie pushed by the American Trucking Association, a lie that has gone on for decades and which no one bothers to question anymore, accepted wisdom from the clerics you internalize and forget about.
Per recent trends documented by the American Trucking Association (ATA), the current truck driver shortage in America is estimated to be 78,000 drivers, and the trucking industry could need more than 160,000 drivers by 2030. Many refugees have large vehicle driving experience working for the U.S. government in their home country, primarily driving Humvees and ambulances. Focusing on this experienced, partially skilled group, and understanding the critical demand for these skills within the trucking industry in the United States, Gii is seeking financing to assist refugees in obtaining their CDL.
Our friends at ATU have been trying to fight back against this nonsense by filing a bill in Arkansas that will re-enforce domicile and training requirements, as well as English language proficiency requirements to get a CDL.
The Arkansas Trucking Association are filing a separate bill to keep the loopholes open which allow the insourcing of unvetted foreign labor.
As it turns out, Texas pushed similar legislation in 2023 -
At this point in the story it bears repeating that the United States freight market has been described by many in the industry as being in a ‘Freight Recession’ but what we are seeing here is actually a massive flooding of the market by recently insourced drivers that companies like Amazon are only too happy to take advantage of for the purposes of extremely cheap freight. All of this is at a cost to American companies who do the right thing, and (try to) pay Americans market wages; bummer so many of them have been going out of business the last couple of years.
Anyone ever ask why Amazon doesn’t just employ these folks directly? Why doesn’t Amazon have their own trucks or their own driver training programs?
I guess when you abuse illiterate ‘refugees’ that are prone to collisions, and seem to have a problem in understanding weather reports or laws against substance abuse, when these incidents take place and the lawsuits start piling up, the degrees of separation that Amazon and others like them have built up around them act as an impenetrable wall of unaccountability.
I’m going to be doing a lot more work on this in the near future; please stay tuned, and feel free to contact your nearest Congresscritter and demand that the programs which insource this labor at our direct and collective expense come to an end.
Enjoy your cheap package delivery, I’m sure all of the dead children were worth it.
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com
The trucking industry has been flooded with "immigrants", legal and illegal, and our own government passed out loans and grants for foreigners to 'start businesses", and THIS is what they gets us! You can talk to anyone that works in trucking, works at truck stops, or deals with them on the regular, and they will say the same thing. Many don't really have an earned CDL, they are just issued them, based upon truth or lies, about being "truckers" in their home country. Which means that some guy that may have been driving around town delivering bottled water in Uzbekistan, is now driving an 18 wheeler across America, not even able to read the road signs.
I sent my son a car, and the driver that picked it up, had to use a translator program on his phone to communicate with me, and that was two years ago.
There is going to be more of this, until we do something to fix it! i.e. deport these people, or for the legal ones, actually make them get a real CDL after being trained!
Time was, driving the two lane blacktop or even oiled gravel in the far North, meeting a big rig going the other way, he’d flash his lights to warn you of a speed trap ahead, and you’d wave in thanks, or even chat him up on the old CB radio. Now, I see a big rig coming my way, I am white knuckled on the wheel and hoping he stays in his own lane. Things have changed.