The Accident Waiting to Happen

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 1, 1999 | by Sean Paige

The U.S. Border Patrol has its hands full along the U.S.-Mexico frontier trying to stem the tide of illegal aliens, illicit narcotics and potential agricultural pests that daily besiege it. So the Border Patrol might be forgiven -- until the accident that's waiting to happen actually does -- for its failure to curb another potential threat rolling through border crossings each day: the thousands of trucks and big rigs, many of them unsafe by U.S. standards, that migrate northward in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Just a year before foreign trucks are to be given unlimited access to U.S. roads as part of NAFTA, the Department of Transportation's inspector general, or IG, is warning that only a small fraction of the Mexican trucks crossing the border are being inspected for safety violations. The IG also warns that 44 percent of those that attempt to cross are turned away are unroadworthy -- largely, the IG suggests, because the Federal Highway Administration, or FHWA, has left safety enforcement to states, which have performed that function unevenly.

"With the exception of California, neither FHWA's nor the states' plans provide for an adequate presence of inspectors at border crossings," the IG reports, concluding "that far too few trucks are being inspected at the U.S.-Mexican border and that too few trucks comply with U.S. standards."

Only 13 federal truck inspectors are assigned to the 2,000-mile border, according to the IG. So border stations in El Paso, Texas, where an average of 1,300 trucks cross each day, have only a single inspector on duty, who may have time to scrutinize only 10 to 14 trucks a day. And because most truck inspectors work bankers' hours, according to the IG, the least-safe Mexican trucks usually make the crossing at night, when they're most likely to be waved through. About half of the Mexican trucks stopped in Texas are turned back, the IG found.

At the better-staffed Canadian border, a more modest 17 percent are denied entry.

"FHWA does not have a safety-enforcement program in place that provides a reasonable level of assurance of the safety of Mexican trucks entering the United States, nor does it plan to establish such a program," says the IG. Not, that is, until some American family of four, on their way to Knott's Berry Farm to celebrate Sissy's seventh birthday, becomes road tostadas under a two-ton avalanche of runaway pinatas!