Updated June 14, 2021, as part of Overdrive's 60th anniversary series probing the history of trucking, and that of the magazine itself.
Today, this special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, part of our 60th-anniversary series, in part transports you back to a moment in time in the late 1970s, when owner-operator Gordon Alkire found himself in an old Astro 95 cabover with no brakes heading Southeast down the backside of Monteagle Mountain in Tennessee. It’s a situation that’s not exactly universal among truckers through the years, but not as uncommon as you might think. The occasion in 2019 when this part of my talk with Alkire originally ran was the fiery Lakewood, Colorado, crash of Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, who lost control of his truck on a downhill grade and, ultimately, crashed, killing multiple people and sending multiple others to the hospital.
[Related: Plenty blame to go around in Colorado tragedy, when the damage is done]
In the wake of the tragedy for all involved, including the driver, charged with vehicular homicide among other counts, the recriminations were quick in coming for him from fellow truckers, with no small amount of finger-pointing to this or that cause.
