By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

In any industry, notes Dale Hannington, there are workers and then there are good workers.

Trucking is no different.

Scott Hewitt, the trucker who was behind the wheel of a big rig that killed Tina Turcotte in Hallowell last Friday, wouldn’t make Hannington’s list of good workers.

Hannington is president of the Maine Motor Transport Association. It’s a trade group representing the trucking industry and those who work in it.

On Thursday, he was lamenting the ugly side of the business. That includes drivers like Hewitt, an owner-operator with nearly three dozen motor vehicle convictions, 14 license suspensions and five accidents, including Friday’s fatality.

Hewitt and others with lousy driving records “are blackening the eyes of a lot of people,” Hannington said.

“We’d like to have that type of driver off the road a long time ago,” he added. “Unfortunately, we ran out of time.”

He noted that Hewitt’s right to drive was under suspension, and that his truck plates had been recalled. The paperwork just hadn’t caught up to Hewitt by Friday.

The accident shouldn’t have happened, he suggested, but it did. The process that’s intended to get drivers with Hewitt’s type of record off the roads broke down somewhere along the way.

Hannington said the trucking industry supports steps to rid the road of dangerous truckers as well as dangerous trucks.

Trucking companies are required by law, he noted, “to do due diligence on the drivers” they hire. That includes checking drivers’ accident and traffic-stop records at the time of hiring and again every year that they’re on the payroll.

Owner-operators – people like Hewitt – are supposed to do pretty much the same, but Hannington notes that such self-policing is far from foolproof.

He said brokers, the agents who bring shippers and truckers together to move America’s commerce, can also check drivers’ records. Some do, some don’t.

It isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always cheap.

Maine’s driver records may be read via the Internet, but each search costs $5. That cost can add up for a busy broker. And sometimes time is an issue as well, with perishables that need to get from point to point quickly. Looking up a driver’s history can delay deliveries, and a shipper might look elsewhere for a broker’s services the next time.

It’s not a perfect system but it’s the system that’s there, Hannington notes.

He says good drivers sometimes help to get bad drivers off the nation’s highways. When they see a trucker driving dangerously, some have been known to call police and report the driver. Others sometimes call the driver’s employer.

And “how’s my driving?” stickers on the back of some trailers along with toll-free numbers have also helped to point a spotlight on the worst offenders.

But Hannington says everyone needs to help to promote roadway safety, particularly in construction zones such as the one where Tina Turcotte was killed.

Truckers and other drivers “should be leaving plenty of room between vehicles,” he said, enough so that there are escape routes.

“Our drivers are sharing the road with these guys (bad drivers) all the time; it’s not just people in cars” who are at risk, he said.

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