Page 243 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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EMISSIONS: POWER DIVISION CALIFORNIA TRUCKS—AIR FILTERS OF THE WORLD
Perhaps the hardest hit of all the industries caught in CARB’s regulatory web is the trucking indus- try. They’ve had at least a half dozen regulations to contend with. Peterson Truck’s product support manager, Gary Galindo (2002-19/retired), attended the very first EPA hearing back in 2003 and has
followed it closely ever since. “CARB came out with the Diesel Risk Reduction Program in 1999, which identified diesel particulate matter as carcinogenic. In 2003, they started putting regulations together for on-highway diesel engines. It hit the school buses first because they carry our precious cargo. Then it moved to the garbage collection companies because those are in our neighborhoods. Then came the municipalities, or Public Fleet Rule, for utilities like water and PG&E service vehicles. Then the Port Rule and finally, the California-only Private Truck Fleet Rule,” explains Galindo. “Typically, CARB comes up with a program, and the other states follow suit. But not this time. So if you stay out of California, you can drive a 1980 truck that smokes like a chimney and you’ll be fine. California has become the air filter of the world.”
Bill Bryan of PJ’s Rebar Inc. first encountered the new rules at the Port of Oakland in 2005. “We deliver a million pounds of steel every day. The port is five percent of our business, which is a lot of steel. All those trucks had to have cleaner air to get into the port. So we ended up leasing trucks to be able to go in there.” It wasn’t until a couple of years later, in 2007, that the truck-specific Drayage Truck Regulation was adopted. As PJ’s fleet manager, it was Bryan’s headache to solve.
At first, PJ’s did what most companies did with the regulations—put it off because it wasn’t going to happen for two more years. “It was a struggle for me because we didn’t jump as fast as I wanted to,” says Bryan. “They didn’t realize just how fast two years goes by. We had twenty-two trucks at the time, all pushing twenty years.” But once Bryan convinced upper management of the need to be proactive, he dove in. “These new regulations were going to hurt all of our trucks because they were all older models, so I did everything I could. I asked
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