I-5 Checkpoint Has Truckers, Trucks Fuming

SAN CLEMENTE — From one dawn to the next, a trucker’s world is based on time and movement. A delay is cause to spit out a wad of tobacco, or light up a smoke, and mutter a word or two the trucker wouldn’t want a kid to hear.

Delays don’t get the freight moved--they’re more time, less movement. For a truck driver hauling goods from Los Angeles to San Diego and back, northbound Interstate 5 is the only way to go. And the San Clemente checkpoint is an unavoidable reality.

These days, it takes a lot more time, and movement often slows to a crawl. A $13-million reconstruction project has prompted a single-lane procession that often stretches for miles like a long, slithering snake.

A few surly truckers have found themselves spitting and cursing, brought to a standstill that lasts 30 minutes to an hour or more. Last Tuesday, truckers were stalled for three hours.

For the moment, the San Clemente checkpoint is their bug on the windshield of life. To borrow from the LeAnn Rimes ballad that often blares from the cabs of these 18-wheelers, it makes them “Blue.”

“It’s a huge hassle, and I hate it!” said Rally Ramos, 31, a San Diego trucker.

“They’re allowing way too many guys to back up here,” said one trucker, who asked not to be quoted by name. “It’s been hard for some guys to stop. You’re going the speed limit, then all of a sudden, you hit the wall. Somebody’s gonna get hurt. I’m amazed it hasn’t happened yet.”

But according to the California Highway Patrol, there have been no accidents and no injuries. Just truckers who aren’t happy.

CHP officials, who weigh and inspect the 850,000 trucks that thunder through each year, say the delays are caused by a narrow exit lane, the byproduct of a project to increase northbound lanes from four to six.

“It used to be wide enough for a couple of trucks,” said CHP Sgt. Gary Smith. “Now, it has room for one. Construction has made it real, real tight.”

“We’re looking forward to a return to business as usual,” said fellow CHP Sgt. Lee Hodges. “After it’s done, it’ll be a whole lot better, both for the CHP and the Border Patrol.”

And for truckers like Karl Kirkland.

“It’s been a real problem for me,” said Kirkland, 35, who drives for Marco Rentals, a Santa Ana firm that hauls heavy equipment. “I always have wide loads, and this new exit lane can’t accommodate the width of my rig.”

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The first phase should be finished by mid-June. In the meantime, widebodies must take it slow. No one is more aware of that than Kirkland, whose 18-wheeler--14 feet, 10 inches wide--has to squeeze through a space 10 inches thinner.

So how does he do it?

“I have to get out and move the blasted [guard] rail just to make the thing fit,” Kirkland said, shaking his head.

He’s heard about the waits, but so far, his have been limited to half an hour, which the CHP says is pretty much the average time.

“In the old days,” Kirkland said, “there was no wait at all. You just cruised right through.”

Installation of an all-weather canopy covering the northbound lanes took longer than expected during Tuesday’s morning rush hour, forcing a three-hour snafu that merged cars and trucks into a single lane.

“Boy, am I glad I missed that one,” Kirkland said, noting that wider, larger loads require a special permit and even then are subject to a curfew that keeps them off the freeway from 7 to 9 a.m. and from 3 to 6 p.m.

“A three-hour delay would screw me up big-time,” he said.

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Although the primary function of the checkpoint is to serve as an inland immigration station manned by the Border Patrol, the CHP plays a major role. State law requires that trucks be limited to cargo weighing less than 80,000 pounds.

“Anything heavier, and they tear up the roads,” Smith said. “Even trucks carrying the legal limit have that effect. Ever see how the right-hand shoulder of I-5 looks flattened out, kind of like a smashed pancake? It’s a truck causing that.”

Trucks carrying additional weight are required to get rid of it--immediately.

They do that by moving it to another vehicle, which often has to be summoned from miles away. Until it arrives, they sit . . . stranded with their Peterbilt until the stuff is removed, and they no longer tip the scales.

In addition to widening the northbound lanes, renovation also will create two new secondary way stations, where suspected illegal immigrants or drug traffickers can be pulled over for questioning.

Later phases call for the construction of an inspection access lane one mile south of the checkpoint and a new administration building designed to house a larger number of agents and inspectors for the Border Patrol.

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In the meantime, the San Clemente checkpoint is, in the words of 55-year-old truck driver Richard Wheeler, “trucker hell. I don’t know of anyone who likes it. No trucker likes to be slowed, man. It’s the worst.”

That’s true for Manuel Morales, 53, who hauls wood products from Los Angeles to San Diego twice a week for the Commerce-based company, Elof Hansson. He’s tired of the long delays, saying it’s more time on the Interstate and less with his family.

“It’s especially bad in the mornings,” he said. “You have to get up earlier and earlier just to beat it. The worst thing about it is all the fuel it burns. Diesel. This thing really gets to smoking, man. It costs a lot of money to just sit and burn that fuel.”

Ed Jaska, 56, drives a truck for Barr Lumber in the City of Industry. He’s had to wait between 30 minutes and an hour. Talk of that one three-hour delay has already made the rounds at the trucker coffee shops.

But unlike the rest of his buds, Jaska wouldn’t mind.

“Hey, I’m on the clock,” he said with a smile. “I sit here for three hours--they pay me three hours’ overtime.”

But delays exacerbate “the monotony . . . the repetition” of being a truck driver, which Jaska says is the part he doesn’t like.

And the part he does like?

“Being on the open road,” he said with a laugh. “Away from my boss. That part you can’t beat, even if it lasts three hours.”