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How Drivable Will Highway 12 Megaloads Be?

By Steve Bunk, 11-15-10

The four-day trip covering a twisty 175 miles from Lewiston to Billings will take 516 minutes. Photo by Flickr user Mitch LeClair.

Although legal questions remain, four giant truckloads are ready to leave Lewiston, Idaho, and travel over Lolo Pass on U.S. Highway 12 to the ConocoPhillips refinery in Billings.

The details of how, when or if the transport will take place could depend on the outcome of a hearing recently set for Friday, Nov. 19, in Boise. At the hearing, which was required by the courts, the Idaho Transportation Department will consider a petition from three Idaho residents to stop the use of permits the department last week. The petitioners seek to halt the shipments while a formal trial with witnesses is held before an administrative law judge. Conoco has filed a brief requesting the petition be denied, principally because the permits were issued. The company contends the permits resolve the case.

“Conoco is taking the position that it has the right to go and we’re holding it up,” said Natalie Havlina, an attorney for the firm that represents the residents.

In the past, the department allows several so-called “overlegal” loads every year, although, unlike the giant equipment now in Lewiston, they did not block traffic going both ways on the two-lane road. Rod Chandler, a trucker out of Jerome in southern Idaho, has transported numerous oversized loads on Highway 12 and throughout the West. His 53-foot-long vehicle can haul 70,000 pounds per load. According to ITD documentation, each of the four proposed Conoco loads would weigh 10 times Chandler’s maximum capability and would be almost twice the length of his rig.

The largest of 207 additional megaloads proposed to be hauled on Highway 12 by another company, Imperial Oil, would be almost 200 feet long and would weigh about 500,000 pounds.

Contacted while he was driving on the East Coast, Chandler was not aware of the Highway 12 controversy. “If it’s a product that really needs to be moved, and there’s no other way to do it, then I’d say go ahead and do it,” he said. “Otherwise, take the highway,” he added, referring to larger roads into Montana.

Told that’s not an option because megaloads will be about 30 feet high and can’t clear overpasses on other highways, he said, “Thirty feet high is ridiculous.”

Chandler, who has hauled mining equipment on Highway 12, asked what Conoco was transporting. When he heard they would be two giant coke drums cut in half (each section would stand 26 feet tall lying on its side), he said, “They should cut it again, and make it 15 feet high. In my opinion, there’s no reason to move anything that big.”

Jim Johnson, a Lewiston-based trucker, has driven Highway 12 to Montana many times, carrying wood chips of about 106,000 pounds per load. “From what I hear, they’ll be going slow, and they’ve got the turnouts,” he said. Johnson wasn’t worried by the prospect of traffic delays up to 15 minutes. “I’ve been held up longer than that by hunters hauling their camping gear.”

The longest he has been delayed on a Highway 12 run was about four hours because of avalanches. He’s also been held up by two fatal accidents; in both those cases, the delay was about six hours. While acknowledging that the megaloads would stop traffic going both ways, he did not consider it an issue because traffic is sparse at night, when the trucks would be moving.

Johnson said his rig is the maximum legal length of 75 feet and height of 14 feet. He did not think the extra length and height of the megaloads would cause problems for the drivers. “They’re having special steering put in, so they can navigate the corners, so that part has been engineered out.”

Nor was he bothered by the prospect of potential damage to the highway from the extreme weight. “A Volkswagen with narrow tires has more pounds per square inch than a truck has,” he said. “These issues go through ITD. Their engineers have come up with all sorts of weight and steering formulas, and from what I’m hearing, those trucks will meet all the qualifications.” He said of ITD, “I think they’re more qualified to make these decisions than any judges are.”

A principal stipulation of ITD’s negotiations with Conoco over the shipments was that the company draw up a detailed transportation plan. Prepared by the contracted truckers, Emmert International, the plan took three years to develop and runs more than 700 pages.

Mark Hefty, project development manager for Emmert in its Oregon offices, confirmed that the rigs do have specialized steering. “The trailers are custom-built for these coke drums,” he said. A steel frame specially constructed around the drum sits on top of the dolly, which is steered along with the tractor’s steering. Hefty said this is the company’s normal procedure for extremely large loads.

He said the company’s premier drivers typically begin with smaller loads and work up to the biggest loads as they gain years of experience.

New West obtained a copy of the plan’s timetable for each of four days of the proposed hauls over the 175-mile stretch from Lewiston to the Montana border. It shows that the total travel time would be 516 minutes. Each of the first two days would involve only about two hours of driving time. The third day would be two hours and 20 minutes of driving; the fourth would be the longest, at four hours and 17 minutes. 

The timetable states that driving would begin at about 11 each night. Drivers would be off the road by 5:30 a.m. Hefty, who explained he was not intimately involved in details of the plan, said it was reasonable to assume that much of the remaining hours of shift time would be allotted to pulloffs for other traffic to pass, and for acceleration from standing stops.

The schedule shows 74 turnouts on the route. In nine cases, the time needed to drive between turnouts is listed as 15 minutes; one segment would take 12 minutes. The central issue in the legal action is whether or not ITD regulations allow traffic delays of more than 10 minutes in transporting overlegal loads.

Speeds are not detailed in the timetable. “We could go much faster than we want to go,” Hefty said, “but I imagine on this road, we could go 5 to10 miles per hour down to several hundred feet an hour.”

Using time-and-distance calculations from the Emmert timetable, the average speed for loads over the four days would be 20 mph. Near the beginning of the first day, an 8.2-mile segment west of Spalding would be covered in 10 minutes, requiring an average speed of 49 mph. On the second day, a 6.3-mile segment of three-lane highway near Orofino would take 15 minutes to cover at an average speed of about 25 mph.

The third day of the trip, covering a twisty 53 miles from Kooskia to roughly half the remaining distance to the Montana border, has five segments that the plan says would require 15 minutes each to travel.

Papers submitted to the Idaho Supreme Court by Conoco say three segments have “secondary turnouts” along the way. A fourth segment, west of Wild Goose Campground, would require an average speed of 33.6 mph to travel its 8.4 miles in the allotted 15 minutes. The final segment of the day is 6.6 miles to be traveled in 15 minutes, at an average speed of about 26 mph.

Average speed on the last day, spanning the last 47.3 miles of the route, would be about 11 mph. It has four segments that would take 15 minutes, and another listed at 12 minutes.

Each Conoco load would by escorted by five pilot cars, two state police vehicles and two signboards.

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