All this mess on 94 got me reminiscinu lol
this happened to me a few months ago on 84 in Oregon coming down cabbage/Pendleton headed west. I don’t remember if I ever posted the story in here, but I thought I’d share. It’s a long story, just a forewarning.
anyways, I had a hazmat load going to Portland about four months ago and just the way everything had been set up, I was doing a lot of night driving. That night, I was coming down the backside of cabbage and I was taking it extremely easy, due to the fact that this was my very first hazmat load ever. So, I’m all the way in the right lane, flashers on, holding at the speed limit and, overall, having a decent ride.
well, about halfway down the mountain, this FedEx driver pulling doubles comes flying down behind me in the right lane. I’m still holding at right about the speed limit, so I just hold my lane. I figured that if he wants to keep flying down the mountain, there’s plenty of roadway for him to pass me. He doesn’t. Instead, he gets ride up on my bumper to where I can barely see his headlights and stays there. This makes me very nervous because I am obviously placarded with corrosives and very obviously following all the safe protocol for descending a steep grade, so I don’t understand why somebody wants to be right on my ass.
anyways, my speed starts to pick up a little bit due to the decline, and I need to slow back down. Mr. FedEx, however, is still right up my back door. I know that if I use the break to slow down, he’s going to hit me. I think and I think and finally I come up with a solution.
I completely disengaged my engine brake and sped up about 10 or 15 mph in a very short stretch of road. This put about five or 600 feet in between me and the FedEx driver, and when I saw that I had enough room to do this, I use my engine brake and stab braking to get back down to below my safe speed. It only took a few seconds to do this entire maneuver. I figured that FedEx had enough room and ample forewarning to be able to change lanes in past me if he wanted to keep booking it downhill.
once again, he chose not to do so. Instead, he comes flying at my back door and only at the last minute does he slow down to a safe speed to where he doesn’t hit me. At this point, I realize that there’s nothing else I can do that this driver is going to respond to. He’s choosing not to pass, he’s choosing to tailgate, and I’ve done everything within my power to act defensively in this situation. So I told myself, “fuck it. If he wants to ride my ass, he can ride my ass the rest of the way downhill, because I’m not moving, and I’m not speeding up”.
about a minute and a half later, I’m looking out my mirror and I see fog on the roadway behind me. I snap my eyes back front to make sure that I haven’t just rolled into a fog bank without paying attention, but there’s no fog. I kept looking in the mirror to figure out why the fog was only behind me, and then right about the same time I caught the smell, I realized what was going on. FedEx had smoked his brakes.
At that point, I got a little worried, because if his brakes weren’t working, I was going to go ahead and move left so that he could just shoot down the mountain without crashing into me. Thankfully, however, there was a truck ramp right ahead of me and he took it before I had to maneuver any.
I still think about it. No regrets.
