K-383 dangers force tough choices

By KIRBY ROSS
Phillips County Review

PHILLIPSBURG — A “perfect storm” of long-standing problems converged in far northwest Phillips County last week, resulting in multiple accidents on K-383 highway, all of which will shortly have a spillover effect on into the city of Phillipsburg.

That perfect storm of problems includes years of legislative underfunding of needed upgrades to K-383; flooding in Nebraska; and huge overweight wind turbines traveling local highways.

While thousands of oversize, overweight loads have been passing through Phillips County for the past five years — at least 5000 in four years, according to KDOT — that number was increased recently as additional loads have been funneled here as a result of other highways being closed off due to flooding in Nebraska.

As that increase arrived in Phillips County, it was routed through Long Island and Almena along K-383, which is only 23 feet wide and has no shoulders. And all that precipitation that caused the flooding in Nebraska was also falling on Phillips County, resulting in dirt shoulders turning into mud quagmires.
With K-383 being just 23 feet wide, oversize loads of up to 16 feet wide have been permitted to travel down that highway’s 25 mile length.

So between mud, narrow roads, wide loads and increased volume of loads came that perfect storm of factors last week, resulting in one grain semi, and two semis carrying wind turbine tubes becoming casualties of K-383.

Adding to the concern, a photo of a school bus being forced off the road by an oversize load along K-383 went viral locally last week.

So far, there have been no injuries. With the knowledge that this situation is extremely dangerous and won’t be getting any better until the legislature starts funding fixes along K-383 around a half decade from now, local officials got together at the Phillips County Courthouse on Monday morning, and made some tough decisions that will reduce this dangerous situation.

Present at the meeting were the three Phillips County commissioners, two officials from the Kansas Department of Transportation, the Phillipsburg mayor, two Phillipsburg city council members, the Phillipsburg supervisor of public works, and the Phillips County Review.

How We Got To This Point
The problem originally arose around 2014. At that time a dozen or more trucks carrying oversize wind turbine components were passing through the county every day. Sometimes four or five an hour would come through.

Along with them came the pilot car drivers who seemed to have been recruited from Hollywood stunt driver schools.

And stunts they would perform. Driving on sidewalks, driving in reverse past traffic on highways, driving down ditches, driving on the wrong side of the road, swerving and forcing surprised oncoming motorists into ditches, coming to screeching-sideways-brake-slamming-tire-rubber-smoking stops to block traffic in multiple lanes — these guys were likened locally to drivers from “Fast and Furious” or “Smokey and the Bandit.”

And those were the complaints just in Phillipsburg. Since the loads were detoured to K-383, the bad behavior of the pilot car drivers has continued. Last week, a photo of a school bus being forced off the road outside Long Island went viral, and included a comment by a local resident, Tamme Johnson, regarding wide loads and pilot driver behavior on K-383 — “I know of people who have been run into the ditch. I have held my breath when road conditions were horrible, but they were out anyway. Anyone who travels this highway has stories, and they seem to have no end. This community is my home and I never want to respond to another oversized load related accident on this stretch.”

As for the oversize semis, they don’t have the maneuverability that the pilot car operators do, but in Phillipsburg they have made up for it by driving on sidewalks, plowing over road signs, and ignoring simple rules of geometry and the basic laws of physics. At least twice, they got stuck at the bank intersection in Phillipsburg because the wind turbine blades were too long to make the corner without taking out buildings.

Public complaints made directly to the motor carriers were sometimes met with responses that their permits from the Kansas Department of Transportation allowed them to ignore traffic regulations. There were also at least two comments from carrier drivers that hollering at them would result in a visit from FBI agents for interfering with interstate commerce.

With public outrage slowly building in 2015, a large number of complaints were directed to the Phillips County Sheriff’s Department, the Kansas Highway Patrol, and the Kansas Department of Transportation.
The reaction from KDOT was initially somewhat slow. In response to direct contact from the Phillips County Review at one point KDOT did state they were aware of the local problem; that the special permits that oversize/overweight load carriers receive do not allow them to break any traffic laws whatsoever; and that complaining to motor carrier drivers about their lack of observance of traffic laws would not result in FBI investigations.

A lukewarm response to citizen’s complaints by the Phillips County Sheriff’s Department was seen by some local political observers as playing a very large part in the 2016 election, and in Phillips County’s new sheriff, Charlie Radabaugh, winning the August 2016 primary (he ran uncontested in the November 2016 general election). During his campaign Radabaugh ran on a law-and-order platform, and is widely seen by the local populace as keeping his promise, including holding traffic law breaking heavy load drivers to account throughout 2017, 2018, and into 2019.

During the earlier 2015 and 2016 time period the Kansas Highway Patrol did step into the void quite aggressively. As they began pulling over and ticketing oversize load scofflaws, the freewheeling Wild West atmosphere began easing a bit towards the end of 2016.

But while the over-the-top driving tactics did settle down by late 2016 as a result of the Highway Patrol’s efforts, there were still problems with the massive 200 foot-plus blades coming through the county.

Platooning in three-truck convoys, it was impossible for vehicles to get by them, resulting in mile long traffic jams.

In addition, as those blades, some of which are over 230 feet long, would come south down U.S. 183 they eventually ran into those nasty problems of physics and geometry.

U.S. 183 southbound out of Nebraska reaches a t-intersection at U.S. 36 a block west of the stoplight in downtown Phillipsburg.

So these convoys of exta-long loads would have to make a 90 degree turn there. And as those wind turbine blades are making that 90 degree turn, the 200 foot-plus blades swing outwards, out of the lane of traffic, over the curbs, over the grassy right-of-way, over the city sidewalk, and on toward the First National Bank and Trust building on the west side of U.S. 183.

So some semi drivers would back up, get out of their cabs, and go to work physically tearing down road signs on the opposite side of the road so they could cut the corner and reduce their 90 degree turn to maybe a more manageable 70 or 80 degree turn.

And, in doing so, after tearing up the street signs they would have to drive across curbs, and sidewalks, and city rights-of-way next to the other First National Bank building on the east side of U.S. 183.
Then, as they were continuing that turn, they would have to drive up on the sidewalk on the south side of U.S. 36, requiring anybody parked there to move their vehicles and causing the denizens of Shelly Ann’s Cafe to wonder if the trucks might come through the front window and ruin their meal.

Twice in 2016 — once in February and once in July — the blade loads just could not readily make the turn, no matter how much maneuvering they did. And once committed to the turn, they couldn’t back up. During those two times, all four lanes of U.S. 36 and both lanes of U.S. 183 were completely blocked for 45 minutes. Back and forth, inches at a time, finally broke the impasse.

The time that happened in July 2016 was the final straw — KDOT finally cracked down, at which point the oversize overweight loads were detoured around Phillipsburg.

That detour necessitated the loads cutting off of U.S. 183 and onto K-383 just south of the Nebraska state line 20 miles north of Phillipsburg.

So this particular KDOT solution eased the pressure in P-burg, but created a whole new set of issues for drivers in northwest Phillips County and northeast Norton County.

Primary among those new problems is the fact that K-383 is only 23 feet wide, compared to the almost-30-foot wide U.S. 183.

And while around six-feet of that extra length on 183 is road shoulder–383 has no shoulders at all.

But for almost three years along that narrower 383 roadway — a roadway that KDOT and the Kansas Legislature both recognize as being extremely hazardous — there were no major incidents other than some close calls, additional run-ins with hot dog pilot car drivers, and major traffic backups behind slow-moving heavy loads.

That all changed for the worse when in early 2019 constant snowfall and constant rainfall turned the Midwest into a quagmire.  While that precipitation resulted in flooding around our region, it also had a serious effect along the sides of no-shoulder K-383. That effect was deep mud.

So driving down K-383, there was no room for error for heavy load drivers. Deviate 6 inches over the white line at the edge of the road on U.S. 183, and you still have close to three feet of shoulder. Deviate six inches over the white line at the edge of the road on K-383 and the entire right side of a heavy oversize wide load semi gets sucked into an unforgiving bog.

And that is exactly what happened near Long Island in northwest Phillips County on Monday, March 25.
In that incident, once the truck tires hit that mud shoulder the vehicle quickly overturned.

The semi tractor and trailer were able to be recovered using regular heavy duty wreckers. The giant wind turbine tube was another matter. Special cranes had to be hauled in, and the entire 25 mile length of K-383 had to be shutdown for hours on March 27.

One estimate put the cost of the recovery of the tube at $100,000. In addition, at least 70 motorists wanting to drive K-383 during this period were turned away by law enforcement at the eastern terminus of the route.

With the tube being recovered and loaded on the afternoon of March 27, Phillips County Sheriff Charlie Radabaugh gave the all-clear at 3:50 p.m. K-383 was open for business again.

Less than 15 hours later, disaster struck again.  Another oversize semi carrying a wind turbine tube was traveling down K-383 less than two miles from the site of the other accident.

Perhaps cautious of the mud shoulder that caused the previous accident, that semi came upon an oncoming grain semi, and the two trucks side-swiped each other.

Once again K-383 was shut down for hours.

To top it off, during that same time frame last week a school bus was forced off the highway by an oversize wind turbine load. A concerned resident in a vehicle behind the bus snapped a photo, which then went viral throughout Phillips County.

These incidents had a more widespread effect than just causing local concern or shutting down the highway however, — the shockwaves quickly reverberated all the way to the state capital.

As this all was blowing up, the Phillips County Sheriff’s Office made the following post on social media — “Sheriff Radabaugh was interviewed by KFRM 550 AM Radio this morning in regards to Highway 383 issues….Another interview was completed with the Phillips County Review….Numerous other phone calls have been received from concerned citizens and Sheriff Radabaugh wants everyone to know that the issue is being addressed in Topeka.”

The next four days resulted in a flurry of contact between the Sheriff’s Office, the Phillips County Commissioners, the Phillipsburg mayor, the Phillipsburg City Council, and the Kansas Department of Transportation.

At this point, it was generally recognized by all parties that there were not going to be any easy solutions. While earlier this year a legislative task force recognized poorly-designed K-383 as being hazardous, budget cuts and underfunding of highways for the past seven years has put any fixes off into the future. Under current planning, K-383 is not slated to begin undergoing upgrades until 2022. Maybe then, maybe longer.

And that’s just a tentative beginning date for a project that will then take years.

So it is now widely recognized by those involved that K-383 is too dangerous to continue to run these oversize loads down the highway.

With that knowledge, on Monday morning. April 1, the decision-making parties got together at the County Courthouse during the regularly scheduled meeting of the Phillips County Commissioners.

The result of that meeting? With controls in place, loads will soon be coming back through the City of Phillipsburg again.

The Temporary Solution
During the April 1 meeting, KDOT informed those present that 110 heavy loads are permitted to come down U.S. 183 in the next 30 days.

KDOT engineer Jeff Stewart noted, “Highway 183 is the preferred rout out of Nebraska due to the Nebraska flooding.”

It was also pointed out that a number of these heavy wind turbine and wind blade loads are heading to a new wind field near Colby, while others are heading on south to Garden City to be stockpiled on a 700 acre site.

Regarding getting them there, Stewart stated that other alternative routes, K-283 and K-8, “are even worse than 383.”

There was a consensus among those present at the meeting that while the wide loads that had come through Phillipsburg from 2014-2016 had been somewhat of a problem, the major issue back then lay primarily with the drivers of the pilot cars.

“While there’s a problem with the size of the loads, the real problem is that some of the pilot car drivers are a bunch of idiots,” said Phillipsburg Councilman Mike James.

Not only was there no disagreement, this comment resulted in a discussion of examples of actions of the pilot drivers, which were said to be “a disaster.” Specifically discussed was the practice of some pilot cars in driving the wrong way down roadways and suddenly swerving into oncoming traffic.

Sheriff Radabaugh told the group that he would make sure his people did their part.

“Any pilot car driver who gets out of line, I’ll see to it that it is brought to his attention,” said Sheriff Radabaugh. Explaining further, Radabaugh said “that attention will be expensive for them,” pointing out that his department will be diligent in ticketing violations of traffic laws.

Ultimately and without exception, those at the meeting acknowledged that the cold hard fact of the matter was that the situation along K-383 was “a serious safety issue,” was unacceptable, and that sooner or later somebody was going to get hurt or killed along K-383 if a change wasn’t made.

As a result, loads will soon be coming back through Phillipsburg — an increase will probably be noticeable within the next 30 days. KDOT’s Stewart stated at the meeting that they will limit lengths on the blades to 200 feet, which may help avoid situations of motor carriers getting stuck making turns at the bank intersection.

Stewart also said that when permitting the loads to come through Phillipsburg they will include a requirement that motor carriers call ahead to the Sheriff’s Department.

It was stated it was hoped that law enforcement assistance provided coming through town would make the situation easier for all involved. With that Radabaugh commented he’ll provide whatever help he can, noting that it would be on the motor carriers to make sure the phone calls for assistance were made.