Thousands of gallons of liquid moving at highway speeds behind the headache rack can put the fear of God in a driver, says Dennis Holliday.
“A lot of guys get scared” thinking about it, Holliday says. They can’t handle the careful driving required to stay safe in such an operation, especially if they’re pulling a single-bore noncompartmentalized tank without partitions that can reduce the sloshing. “45,000 pounds of liquid, and it’s moving, and it hits a brick wall — there’s a lot of force behind that.”
An experienced tank hauler, however, can “feel the liquid moving back and forth and guess when it’s coming. You learn how to work that accelerator and change gears” to mitigate the forward force as well as increased rollover potential in curves.
Though it’s not always required to sign on with a tank fleet – plenty of them offer training to new hires without the requisite experience – possession of such fine-tuned trucking skill is among the reasons tank haulers in an Overdrive survey last year reported above-average income levels.
“A lot of the stuff we haul is flammable, and most of the customers don’t want you to touch it,” he says, which minimizes involvement in unloading. “The biggest thing we have to wait on is tank washes” — unless the receiver doesn’t have space to accept the delivery or a shipper hasn’t formulated the product, a rare-enough occurrence.
Many tank wash locations have space leased by particular carriers and also function like a trailer terminal, Holliday says. In those locations, if you’re not with the carrier leasing space there, you might get delayed in line.
