A two-year effort by state Rep. Ruth Kagi, D-Lake Forest Park, to remove dangerous trucks and drivers from Washington’s highways moved closer to the finish line on Feb. 28 when the House of Representatives voted 88-9 for the Tony Qamar and Daniel Johnson Act.
Qamar and Johnson were prominent seismologists who were killed Oct. 4, 2005, when logs spilled from a speeding and overloaded logging truck. The driver responsible for the fatalities had a history of safety problems and tested positive for methamphetamines.
Nonetheless, he was soon back on the highway driving logging rigs for a company with a long history of safety violations. Within months, he spilled another load of logs in a non-injury accident.
“What happened to Tony Qamar and Daniel Johnson was a preventable tragedy,” said Kagi. “The highway safety reforms we have named in their honor will prevent similar tragedies by creating a statewide system for tracking chronic safety violators and getting them off our roads.”
In 2006, Kagi passed legislation that brought the Washington State Patrol, Washington Trucking Association, Department of Licensing and other players together to create a strategy for dealing with drivers and companies with a pattern of safety violations. The reforms passed by the House promise to improve the safety of state highways by identifying unsafe trucks and trucking companies, and focusing safety compliance reviews on those companies.
The bill requires trucks over 26,000 pounds to get a USDOT number. All safety violations will be tracked in the same data system that is now used to track interstate trucks. Washington will just add the data about safety violations for the trucks that operate within the state’s borders. The bill also gives the State Patrol the authority to put a carrier that is a risk to public safety out of service until serious violations are corrected.
The reforms that passed the House today were strongly endorsed by the Washington Trucking Association.
“We’ve got a great group of drivers, but there are always a few scoundrels out there that are working in our industry, and we want them gone,” Washington Trucking Association President Dan Gatchet told a Jan. 24 press conference. “This is going to go a long way toward giving the patrol the tools they need to get these people off the road.”
Kagi commended the Trucking Association and the State Patrol for their vision and commitment to making state highways safe from dangerous trucks, and avoiding preventable tragedies.
Eileen Llana, widow of Daniel Johnson, and Dr. Kathleen Ellsbury, widow of Tony Qamar, supported Kagi’s legislation throughout the process.
“This is a good law on the table in front of us,” Ellsbury told a public hearing on the measure.
House Bill 1304 now moves to the Senate for further consideration.
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