If something goes wrong in this world, the poor sod on the bottom of the chain of command will be the one who pays the price. Bank on it. Which is to say the best way to avoid being buried in a heap of you-know-what is to prevent anything from going wrong in the first place.

I recently received a letter from a chap named Bob, quoting from the new “plain English” version of the Transportation of Dangerous Goods handbook: “A driver could be charged for non-compliance even if the consignor caused the violation.”

Maybe there’s some good to come of the translation after all, even if only that one point has been clarified. It has always been the case, by the way, that the driver can be held accountable for certain violations, even if someone else causes them to occur.

Two personal experiences come to mind. Once, when I was taking on a mixed load of chemical in a multi-compartment tanker, the shipper gave me the wrong placard for one of the products. Knowing that I was responsible for having the load correctly placarded and labelled, I compared the placard I’d been handed with the placard required under the technical name of the product (not the brand name) found in the TDG driver’s handbook, as I have always done. It wasn’t the same.

I brought it to the shipper’s attention, and then the eight-buck-an-hour expert behind the bulletproof glass proceeded to berate my observation, saying the company had been using that placard on that chemical for years, that the driver’s book was wrong, that I was just making a nuisance of myself, and that I could bloody well unload the whole trailer if I wasn’t happy. You know the drill. He wasn’t going to put what he believed was the wrong placard on the load because then his rear-end would have been in a sling, but he expected me to do it.

After a few calls to head office, a conversation with some chemical engineer, it was agreed that their placarding instructions were wrong. It took several hours to sort out — unpaid hours, I might add — but I left the place correctly placarded. That was all I was worried about.

The next case had more severe implications. I was running team, pulling the shipper’s tank trailer, when an accident occurred (I was in the bunk, asleep), causing two of the placards to be removed from the trailer. The police discovered that underneath the placard for the product in the tank was another placard for an entirely different product, which would have demanded an entirely different emergency response measure. This was serious stuff.

The shipper, it turns out, had a practice of keeping the two different placards in the same placard holder, switching them around as the different products were loaded onto the trailer. So when the outer placards in two of the holders were stripped away in the wreck, revealing the wrong placards, it sent a confusing message to the responders. And since it’s ultimately the driver’s responsibility to ensure that the load was correctly placarded, the cops were adamant about laying charges. The shipper admitted the fault, and we got off with a stern lecture about checking our placards before we leave the plant.

Of course there are other situations where drivers find themselves at the mercy of the good judgment of someone else in the chain of command: hours of service violations, overweight violations, wheel separations, other less dramatic mechanical defects — all can be traced back to the guy or gal who signed the papers. And that’s my point here. You can avoid a lot of potential unpleasantness by just looking ahead and seeing the implications of setting a particular chain of events in motion.

In his letter, Bob states, “It makes a good case for a union or some kind of association to actually represent the driver.” Presumably he means it would make sense to have someone from the driver’s side of the discussion making the point that whatever might go wrong, it’s not always the driver’s fault. There’s plenty of merit to Bob’s words, but in the end, crap flows downhill. It’s up to you to conduct your due diligence, to make sure your backside is covered, and to send the problem back to whoever created it. But you have to do it before something goes wrong.