Ahh, Springtime. It reminds me of a facility audit. A winter’s worth of dog crap is surfacing in my backyard, and sooner or later I’ll have to deal with it. How’s that for a metaphor?

I spent a while today dealing with the former, after having spent some time pouring over the April 2007 edition of CVSA’s “North American Standard Out-of-service Criteria” handbook — pictorial edition. I guess that’s where the metaphor came from.

The guidebook contains 63 pages of photos — six pics on a page — of what I charitably describe as “not this industry’s finest moments.” Some of the pictures will curl your hair.

There’s one of an escape hatch on the roof of a school bus — wired shut from the outside. And there’s a photo of two coils of steel sitting on a flatbed — each secured with a single chain. Or, how about the pictures on page 125: a couple of trailer axle wheel-ends with no brake drums. Just brake shoes hanging there in space.

Some of the tire pictures are amusing. Some entirely devoid of tread, some are worn so flat in spots they would have made a hellacious racket going down the road, and there are a couple of shots of sidewall bulges the size of softballs on the outside walls of the tire. I’ve never seen anything like it.

What I fail to understand is how some of the problems could have been allowed to get to the stage they were when the camera-toting inspector caught up to them.

In my 20 years on the road, I’ve had my share of arguments with maintenance people over what constituted a defect and what didn’t. I’d argue sometimes that so-and-so needed fixing and the tech would say that it was still within tolerance, or something like that; but to venture out of the yard with something as obvious as a cracked frame or missing springs? Or wheel stud holes elongated to more than two inches? They’re all in the book. Apparently lots of drivers don’t bother checking their trucks, and lots of fleet owners don’t bother making sure their drivers are doing inspections.

Most of the defects pictured in the book were not recent, so it’s not as if the problem arose the day the camera caught the truck.

My question is this: is it sheer ignorance, or is it willful and deliberate flaunting of the law?

I can honestly say that over the course of 20 years behind the wheel, I’ve never had any fleet training on vehicle inspections or how to identify defects — not that there would have been much guesswork on the driver’s part in some of these examples.

While I believe vehicle inspection training would be an asset to any driver, I can’t imagine why anyone would drive a truck in an obviously unsafe state.

So maybe it’s that some drivers just don’t bother with daily inspections.

The trip inspection regs we have now — and even the new ones coming our way this year — require drivers to inspect their vehicles everyday, but the regs do nothing to protect the driver in situations where driving an unsafe vehicle is a viable alternative to being sent home without pay for refusing to drive defective equipment. And believe me, that still happens.

I’d like to know that the trucks I share the road with are safe, and I believe for the most part they are. But as the photos in this book clearly illustrate, that’s not always the case.

So before you find yourself in the position I’m currently in, why not go out and have a look around your backyard and see what little time bombs are ticking away under your trucks. I know many fleets that are very proactive as far as maintenance and repair is concerned, but many are not. Many rely solely on driver reports to detect possible deficiencies in the equipment, and even then, will scrimp on the repair costs by asking the driver to return to the yard to have the repairs made.

For fleets like that, a facility audit might be the best thing that ever happened to them. It might save them the embarrassment of appearing in the next edition of the CVSA Out-of-service Criteria guide. I’d be willing to bet most of the fleets pictured in the book don’t have a copy of it on their shelves.

Like me and my backyard, if these drivers and owners had stayed ahead of some of the problems they would likely have saved themselves a considerable amount of grief. Happy Spring.