I was at a Parent Meeting at my daughter's high school recently, and the instructor for the AP US History course was explaining his course, that it covered the time period between Columbus' discovery and 9/11.  A parent asked him why he didn't cover up to the present day, and he explained that, in the academic community, usually a couple of decades have to pass for history to "settle."  What he meant is that the "facts" sometimes aren't known or apparent until many years later.

Thinking about 9/11, I was reminded of the impact that event had on our industry.  The economic impact now seems like it was a rehearsal for the current recession.  The day of the attack, our local major metropolitan airport called the company I was managing and asked us to station a truck there 24 hours a day.  We were there for the next 3 months, while they put the job up for bid, and then one of our competitors under-bid us and got the contract.  The driver would sit at the split between arrivals and departures, and every 15 minutes he or she would cycle through both.  If one of the airport personnel had an unattended vehicle, we would take it to a holding lot.  We moved very few vehicles.  We were there to threaten, mostly, to keep people from leaving their vehicles unattended.  Drivers worked 4- or 8-hour shifts.  I worked a few shifts myself.  The 10 pm-2 am shift was very boring.  The most interesting thing I saw was a coyote run down the street into departures shortly after midnight one night.  Apparently he was taking the red-eye somewhere.

Another thing we did, along with most of the other towing companies in our municipality, was station trucks at certain times of the day near the major bridges in town, presumably to tow away any vehicles with bombs off the bridge before they blew up, if a terrorist was so inclined to attack the bridge, which apparently was a concern for awhile after 9/11.

I sometimes wondered what role we would play if there actually was a terrorist vehicle left unattended, or if a vehicle left unattended actually turned out to be a terrorist vehicle, perhaps with a bomb inside.  This is the tow truck driver's job, to transport vehicles with bombs inside?  Talk about pressure!  And where do you tow it to?  It made me think of a tow I had done several years before that, right after the Oklahoma City bombing.

I was driving swing shift, and I got off at midnight.  Around 11, I got a call to impound a vehicle from a no-parking zone downtown in the large city where I worked.  When I got there, it was the only vehicle on the street.  It was a VW Bus, circa 1975.  What was odd was that it was parked in the Police Vehicle Zone.  Who in the world would leave their VW Bus overnight in a Police Vehicle Zone?  The police had ticketed it, called in the tow, and left.  It was a weeknight, and the streets and sidewalks were deserted.  I hooked up to the vehicle and checked all the doors--locked.  I didn't want to dollie the vehicle, so I worked to unlock it.  The police contract gave us authorization to unlock vehicles we were impounding for them.  VW Buses can be tricky to unlock.  I tried the doors and wing windows and was walking around behind the vehicle to go to the other side, when I grabbed the rear flip-up door and it was open.

This VW Bus was the cleanest, most immaculate VW Bus I have ever seen.  I had to crawl through the rear door to open one of the main doors.  When I climbed in, there were no rear seats in the van.  I thought that was odd.  In fact, other than the driver and passenger seats, there was NOTHING in the van--it was empty and spotless--EXCEPT... there was a double-size briefcase sitting upright right in the middle of the van.

Hmmm....

It was at that point that I realized that this Police Vehicle Zone took up the whole block right in front of the rear entrance to the FEDERAL BUILDING.  Yes, I am not kidding you.  This was about 3 months after the Oklahoma City bombing.

What did I do?  I was a commission driver in the last 30 minutes of his shift.  I completed the tow.

When I got to the impound lot, I told the graveyard shift driver about it, and he called the police.  They came down with the bomb squad to check out it out, after I went home (I was off-duty at midnight, and I didn't see the point of waiting around to see if the briefcase would explode).  Turned out to be clean.  I never did find out why the owner parked it there, or what was in the briefcase, and my wife really didn't appreciate the fact that I continued on with the tow after I understood the similarities.  But I got my commission, and I finished my shift on-time.  That was the important thing.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Training, particularly Driver Training, is one of those fields that requires supreme patience.  I had one of the best Driver Trainers in the business working for me for several years at an impound company.  It helped that he had 25 years of experience and had won several state and regional driving competitions, both light- and heavy-duty.  He did most of the training, but before I would unleash the new Driver onto the unsuspecting public, I’d try to run a few shifts with the new Driver.

 I really wanted our female drivers to succeed, so we gave them the best training we could.  One evening I was working a swing shift with one of them, and things were going smoothly when I got a phone call from one of our carrier drivers.  He was in a rural area, doing a police impound, and he was stuck.  It was almost 10 pm, and I’d been at work since 8 that morning.  Boy, did I ever regret answering that call.

Sheila and I drove out to find him.  He was 20 miles outside of town, near a main river.  Some miscreants had evidently been doing something wrong, and the County Sheriff had busted them and had their 2 vehicles impounded.  They were on a dirt road a quarter-mile from the paved road.  Another driver had the smaller car and was waiting for us out at the paved road.  He didn't want to leave until we got there.  I soon found out why.

They’d been there for about 3 hours.  The police had broken up a group of people fishing down by the river.  They scattered when the police showed up.  When our drivers arrived, the police left.  When the police left, the people came back.  Fortunately, the police were nearby and returned to find that 2 of the people had outstanding warrants.  They arrested them and shooed everyone else away.  Again, they left (which is a little odd).

The larger vehicle was a 1-ton dually pickup, with no keys.  Noone would cough up the keys.  In the marshy terrain, this made it very difficult to position and load the vehicle.  If we would’ve had the keys, we would’ve just driven it out to the paved road and then loaded it onto the carrier.  The drivers got it onto the carrier, with great difficulty, but the ground was so slick, and our trucks had highway tires, so the driver could not get turned around and probably couldn’t have stayed on the slick road anyway.

The truck I was driving was a four-wheel drive, but still had highway tires.  Sheila and I drove out the goat trail and found the carrier driver.  After a lot of slipping, sliding, and general mayhem (both in the truck and on foot), we decided that to try to get the pickup out with the smaller wrecker.  We got the pickup off the carrier bed, and then, after about an hour of throwing mud, we were able to get it onto the wrecker.  The wrecker was an Eagle, and the pickup was a dually, so the Eagle Strap went up and over the inside dual tire and the ratchet was wedged between the dual tires.  Not ideal.

The goat trail wound through a forest, was narrow, and the mud was so slick that the front end of the pickup simply would slide to whichever side of the road had a downward slope to it, EVEN if we were stationary.  What a nightmare!  We backed the carrier down the road in intervals, winching off of side trees to pull the front of the pickup away from trees when it would slide over too far.  In the middle of all this, Sheila, the trainee (bless her soul--Sheila, I hold a special place in my heart for you--if you're reading this, don't take any of this personally), continually spouted off about how she had been "four-wheeling all her life" and had been "stuck worse than this many times" and offered one crazy suggestion after another.  The winching off the side trees might have been one of them, and I'll give her credit--that worked for awhile.  But the carrier simply couldn't maneuver in the mud, which was getting worse as it got colder and damper.

Finally, I got a little momentum and made it around a couple of bends in the road, and then we came to a rise in the road, followed by about a hundred-foot passage across a swamp (not much water--just mud and tall grass), where the road had been built by dumping fill-dirt into the swamp.  The road was crowned (bad).  I made it over the rise, and about 30 feet across the swamp, and the front end of the pickup took a dive down to my left and into the swamp, wedging against a log submerged in the swamp.

That was a far as we were going to get.

The carrier driver's radio wasn't working well, and I think his cell phone was dead.  He was still back with the carrier.  I finally got ahold of him, told him to lock up the carrier, and walk out to us.  I found a knife and cut the straps off the tow truck and was able to pull away from the pickup.  When the carrier driver got there, we loaded into the cab of the truck and drove back to the shop.  It was 3 a.m. when we got back, and I spent about an hour housing mud off of and out of the wrecker.

Around 7, I called Mitch, my trainer.  I told him the nature of the mess, and where it was, and I went back to bed.  At 11, I woke up, got in my car, and headed out there.  I got a message that the pickup was out and in the storage lot, and they were going back for the carrier.  I also got a call that the vehicle owner was on his way to the storage lot to get the pickup.  I got to the storage lot about 15 minutes ahead of the vehicle owner.  I inspected the pickup--muddy, but no damage, which is amazing, because I remembered bouncing it off a few trees before leaving it in the swamp.  I wrote up an invoice for approximately $750.  The owner showed up a few minutes later, paid in full in cash, and drove it away.  I drove out to the scene, and there was Mitch, with a different trainee, loading up carpet remnants and buckets of heavy gravel they had brought to help them, onto the carrier bed, at the paved road.  They were done and ready to head back.

Unbelievable.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,

Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com