SAN ANGELO, TX —A Walmart delivery may have been delayed early Friday morning when Walmart’s company truck tractor pulling a semi-trailer rolled out of the Stripes Truck Stop at Bell St. and the Houston Harte likely without the driver.
A clerk inside Stripes explained that the truck driver was inside the Stripes pre-paying for the truck’s fuel. Soon thereafter, the clerk noticed the truck rolling southbound across La Follette (the frontage road), and began to roll down the incline onto the Houston Harte Expressway.
The exact location was 1606 La Follette, San Angelo, TX:
Luckily, according to our reporter on the scene, the semi-trailer bottomed out on the curb and stopped the runaway truck from careening across San Angelo’s busy freeway.
The clerk surmised the truck driver failed to set the brakes.
San Angelo police were at the scene directing a detour of traffic off the frontage road to avoid the mishap area.
When we left the scene, authorities were waiting for a wrecker.
The 9-1-1 call happened at approximately 12:30 a.m. Friday morning.
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Comments
Evidently the clerk and possibly the writer do not under stand how the brakes work on a truck like this.
The air brakes automatically engage. The driver has to release them to move the truck. Sounds like the truck suffered from a mechanical failure.
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PermalinkCorrecting this:
There is no "automatic brake feature" on a non-malfunctioning truck if the driver fails to set the parking break. The parking brake only automatically engages after the tank(s) drop below a certain PSI(usually 20-30). It was likely due to driver negligence(forgot/distracted/failure to maintain/lazy and didnt pull trailer brake too(real bad habit among drivers)) or driver inexperience(unable to identify and/or do a proper pretrip).
If either of the two conditions were met then the aforementioned would not have happened...
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PermalinkMaybe you don't understand how truck brakes work. They do not set automatically. You actually have to set them manually by pulling two air switches in the cab. The only time they automatically set is during a drop in air pressure.
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PermalinkYep!
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PermalinkApparently Mr. Williams is talking from a posterior location. If you don't understand a subject, do not open your pie hole. This was definitely driver error. I would surmise that he was in a hurry, jumped out of the truck and went inside. After well over 3 million safe miles, I've seen this more than once. The chance of this being a mechanical failure are near impossible. It would mean that all the truck's brakes failed at the same time after he had come to a stop. The new class of drivers are nothing like those of years past. Very little pride in doing the job right.
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PermalinkHaha, that's great. If only he had thrown it in park before going inside for a chalupa...
If anyones cares, the second two comments are technically correct. But there's no brain behind the system monitoring the air pressure and automatically engaging a parking brake as a safety feature. On an air brake system, the brakes are all spring loaded closed, applying the brakes. When the engine is running and the pump is building pressure, air is valved in such a way to disengage the brakes. So air brakes are simply held open by air pressure. If the air pressure is released, whether by applying the pedal (simply a pressure regulator/bleed off of sorts), engine dying, line or tank damage etc, the brakes default back to applied and wheel is locked up. You will notice sometimes a truck that encounters a brake problem may start to drag a tire, or the trailer doing so. This is because that corner lost air pressure. When you "set" the parking brake, its just a valve that retains your system pressure in the tanks but dumps everything downstream going to the brakes at the wheels.
In summary, given the fairly foolproof and failsafe design of these brakes for this reason, I can't imagine anything other than the guy didn't dump said air, setting the brakes. A brake failure would mean that the brake linings or mechanisms themselves would have malfunctioned all at the same time on each axle, preventing the shoes from locking the wheels. Seems unlikely... Evidently.
In case anyone wanted to know :)
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PermalinkWell, if it's an automatic, he could have put it in park.. then not set the brakes. It'd still make the trip to the loop, just not as fast.
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PermalinkLazy, tell 'em!
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