Trucking news and briefs for Monday, July 5, 2021:
The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania sentenced John Joseph, Gavin Rexer, Joseph Powell, Dennis Paulhamus and Timothy Sweitzer each to one year of probation and a $100 assessment for conspiring to defraud the United States and violating the Clean Air Act. Joseph, Rexer and Powell were also sentenced to 50 hours of community service, Paulhamus received a $15,000 fine, and Sweitzer was fined $10,000.
Rexer, Powell, and Joseph were employed by Rockwater Northeast, a company that serviced the fracking industry. An investigation found that between August 2013 and June 2014, the five individuals conspired to illicitly disable the emissions control devices in Rockwater’s trucks.
Specifically, they either removed the stock exhaust systems and replaced them with straight pipes or hollowed out the emissions exhaust components by removing environmental filters and elements.
Paulhamus also provided high-tech “defeat” devices to assist in the scheme, which the co-conspirators used to disable and manipulate the trucks’ onboard diagnostics. They concealed these purchases in Rockwater’s books and records by mislabeling them as “exhaust systems.”
They then falsely indicated that the illegally modified trucks had passed vehicle inspections at Sweitzer’s Garage, an inspection station certified by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on July 6 will publish a notice in the Federal Register proposing to amend the Hazardous Materials Safety Permits regulations to incorporate a reference to the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s handbook containing inspection procedures and out-of-service criteria for inspections of shipments of transuranic waste and highway route controlled quantities of radioactive material.
