The load I hauled to Antioch, CA this past week was not only a wide load but also it was quite heavy. The normal legal weight for a load is 80,000 lbs and with this one I was weighing nearly 90,000. That's pretty heavy.

Due to construction CA wouldn't permit the load the move on I-80 and instead they routed me over 200 miles out of my way on secondary state highways through the mountains. It was a very slow drive through there with a number of steep grades.

One downgrade had a truck speed limit of 45 mph, which I obeyed, but I soon learned that even that speed was far too fast for that much weight. Had I known how long the grade was I would have known that but I had no idea just how long it was. It turned out to be about six miles of 6 percent down grade and with that much weight, at that speed, the brakes couldn't take it.

Before I reached the bottom of the grade the brakes on all of the wheels were pouring out so much smoke I was certain they were about to catch fire, and the brake pedal was feeling pretty mushy and almost useless. As it was, if that grade had been just one more mile longer my brakes would have faded completely and I would have had a run away truck on my hands.

Needless to say that was in no way a good feeling. I was feeling pretty nervous about the condition of my brakes when I reached the bottom of the grade and immediately pulled off onto the shoulder of the road to let them cool down. At that point they had faded to the point that it was difficult to get stopped and although I set the parking brake it just wouldn't hold the truck in place and I had to hold down the brake pedal for about 5 minutes before the parking brake finally regained enough friction to hold the truck in place.

I sat there for about 30 minutes watching the smoke roll out of my wheels; After that time it finally slowed and then eventually stopped. I sat for another 15 minutes to allow the brakes to cool even more so that I felt that I could trust them again.

Once I felt they had cooled down enough I took a walk around and checked everything out to ensure the truck was once again safe to move. I measured the brake slack adjuster angles, and verified that all brake pads were intact and not damaged by the excess heat. Everything seemed to be in order and I set out again.

After that near miss I decided to err on the side of caution despite my need to deliver as soon as possible and took the remainder of the down grades at a much reduced speed, relying upon the engine brake to hold back the truck and using the mechanical brakes as little as I could manage, which is what I should have been doing in the first place.

I've been doing this for a very long time and I should have known better. Smoking those brakes and nearly putting myself into what is a potentially fatal run away situation was a stupid rookie mistake that I shouldn't have made. I was angry at myself for the remainder of the day for that stunt.

It did serve to remind me that, despite extensive experience, we can never allow the schedule to make us forget about doing things correctly and safely. A wake up call of sorts just to remind that even the most experienced driver can make a fatal mistake and it's something that should always be at the forefront of a driver's thoughts on the road.

I think that sometimes with experience comes a certain kind of laxness, an over-confidence if you will. That can be fatal. While this experience turned out well, it could have very easily gone the other way and I could have been seriously hurt or killed, not to mention some innocent person or persons could have been as well, which is something no trucker worth his/her salt wants to happen. Any decent trucker would drive the rig off a mountainside rather than kill some innocent person with it, and I am no different. Had that rig gone out of control and been unable to stop I would have readily driven off the road and crashed it rather than kill someone else because of my own mistake.

I'm just glad it didn't come to that as I haven't yet drank all the beers I want to drink before checking out from this miserable little speck of dust in the galaxy.