WASHINGTON — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMSCA) has ordered Gunthers Transport, LLC, based out of Maryland, shut down after an investigation concluded the company to be an imminent hazard to public safety. This isn’t the first time, either.

Company owner Mark David Gunther was convicted on similar charges in 1995.

The company was shut down on November 8 after the FMCSA found patterns of hours-of-service (HOS) and vehicle maintenance violations that considerably increased the chance of serious injury or death to the motoring public.

Gunther’s Transport had a long history of safety violations, including a recent fatal crash in August. The two-year assessment of Gunther’s Transport found that the company was "seriously deficient" in four of the seven BASIC categories: unsafe driving (66.9%), fatigued driving (99.3%), driver fitness (77.3%) and vehicle maintenance (100%).

Eighteen of Gunther’s vehicles were inspected 192 times and were placed out-of-service (OOS) 58 percent of the time — three times the national average.

The company’s drivers were inspected 245 times in the past two years, and placed OOS 16 percent of the time. The national average is 5.5 percent.

The FMSCA also noted that Gunthers has had seven serious crashes — four injuries and a fatality — in the last year. One of the trucks involved in the fatality was found to have a multitude of mechanical defects, including nine serious enough to have put the truck out of service.

They also found that Gunthers either allowed or required drivers to falsify log records — something that harkens back to the 1995 conviction where Mark David Gunther was found guilty on one count of conspiracy to defraud and four counts of making false statements to investigators. Gunther also was convicted of perjury.

You can read the out-of-service order here.

Report on CSA Impact

In related news, the American Transportation Research Insitute (ARTI) released a report detailing the extent to which CSA has impacted the daily operations of trucking companies. The report also describes and analyzes motor carrier attitudes toward, and comprehension of, the MNSCA’s new regulatory program.

Carriers who self-reported having one or more BASICs above threshold were "markedly more likely to experience negative changes to their shipper and broker utilization."

However, most carriers believed CSA to be an improvement over SafeStat, and that it will remove unsafe carriers and drivers from the industry and improve safety.

The 695 carriers surveyed also displayed a high level of knowledge on ARTI’s 14-item CSA knowledge test — although this varied with certain carrier traits and attitudes.

The ARTI will continue to examine CSA impacts annually.