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BLAM!!! Thudda-thudda-thudda-thudda...!!!

(What the h-e-double hockey sticks was that?)

"That", friends, is the sound of a tire, blowing out while underway!

Hey, it happens. Naturally, if you run something over, you could get a blowout right away, or, while driving, something could become wedged in your tire's tread that leads to a blowout later on.

Over- or under-inflated tires? Same thing. Older tires with some miles on them, and a correspondingly shallower tread depth? Sure. (Though you should have caught any of these during your pre-trip inspection, right?)

Too much weight on an axle set? Could be. (Though why did you accept a load that's too heavy for your axle set?)

Even if it has simply been very (very) hot, the tires can overheat. That extra-increased air pressure -- which should otherwise have been safely contained within the tire's intended design parameters -- will definitely find whatever newly-weakened spot(s), in the tire's structure, that it can.

Finally, it could be, and often is, some combination of however many of those factors. And that "weak spot" will be found, I assure you.

But even when most of these things are accounted for, you still just never know.

For instance, start with good tires and proper air pressure, then add a sixteen mile round-trip on a beautiful, but rock-strewn, hay farm road. Pick up a full load. Mix in an eventual downhill run in the left lane of Interstate 80 in Nevada...at 82 MPH...and whaddya get? No points for guessing correctly:

BLAM!!!

Thudda-thudda-thudda-thudda...!!!

(And also, sacre bleu!)

Now, this wasn't even the first time we had had tire issues coming out of that farm. First time, luckily, upon returning from the weighing scale to the truck I saw that one of the super-single drive tires had gone fully flat. I was even able to find the direct cause: a triangle-shaped rock, about three inches high and looking just like a shark's tooth, had embedded itself into the tread! I say "luckily", because, by seeing this right away, I didn't do very much driving on the flat tire -- only enough to get off the scale and get out of the way -- so no further damage occurred. Of course, I was already some thirty miles off of the "main" highway, itself only a two-lane stretch of Rte. 95 in Nevada with still another forty miles to Winnemucca, the nearest place with a commercial tire repair shop. The repair fellow wasn't able to come out until the next morning, and all that cost me an extra day out on the road...

...and it wasn't even the second time we had had issues here!

Second time, I had made it back to Rte. 95 no problem, and was on my way south. Nighttime falling, clear sky, very pretty in fact. Didn't hear anything, didn't feel anything...but a routine scan of the mirrors showed sparks shooting out from the rear passenger side of the trailer!

At this point I was going about 60 MPH on a narrow, hilly stretch, but handling didn't seem to have been affected very much. None of our company's trailers used super-singles, so a blown-out, standard dual tire was still (as far as I knew) partly assisted by the other tire remaining on that axle's stub, not to mention (again, as far as I knew) by both tires on the other axle in the tandem. So, yeah, not great, but better than blowing a super-single.

Only thing was, those sparks meant that the wheel itself was skipping, or being dragged along the pavement, and there was no way to know how long it could last that way, before maybe starting to throw big pieces of shredded metal into suspension or braking components. And I said I was on a narrow, hilly stretch of road. Forget about having a paved shoulder to stop upon; I'd been through here a few times before and knew there was barely any place to pull a truck off the road at all, without possibly rolling over on soft earth -- into some bottomless chasm, probably -- or without creating a hazard by not being far enough off the road.

Luckily, I also knew that on previous trips I had seen a sign for a road to some sort of airfield somewhere along the way, and though it was almost dark now, I knew I hadn't passed it yet. (First step: check to see if I have a cell phone signal, which I did.) By now I was purposely slowing down quite a bit anyway, so I was able to spot the sign with enough space to stop after it. Tricky part upcoming: the airfield road was even far narrower than the one I was on, and it was on my right -- the "blind side" -- and it was now dark enough that I could barely see anything behind me. I was going to have to stop, in the middle of a remote, high-speed, narrow road, do a blind-side back into essentially an alley and, for best results, avoid pushing the trailer into the sagebrush. At least this part of the road was flat.

Well, somehow we were actually able to accomplish this, pretty much how I wanted it and without much correction, before any other big rig came rocketing through the darkness. A CLOSE ONE! Bonus? There was a clearing on the passenger side, back near the tandems, which would give the repair guy room to work without me having to re-position the truck. Also, no other damage had occurred, but of course the guy had been unable to come out until morning, which meant...yep...this episode cost me a good chunk of another day out on the road...

Compared to those other two, though, our titular blowout was quite a different animal entirely. It was the first that happened on a super-single while in motion... and at 82 MPH downhill in the left lane of an Interstate, which I believe has been mentioned previously.

I had easily passed a camper trailer moving rather slowly in the right lane a few ticks before. Nobody directly behind me, so no hurry to get back into the right lane; why pull back over immediately, and risk tossing up a rock into the guy's windshield, y'know? A few ticks more. I was monitoring the passenger-side mirror, was just about to hit the blinker...

When it blew, I heard it before I felt it, and at first I couldn't tell exactly what had happened. I knew I hadn't run anything over, and I was about to start trying to catalog what could have broken, still only creating the first sound, but nothing afterwards, no vibrations or shudders. What could do that? Well, uh, before I was even able to begin running down the list came...those vibrations and shudders! Remember "Thudda thudda..." etc.?

And not merely loud, rapid thumping and roaring sounds, but a sickening swerve, first to the left, then to the right, and then beginning to go left again. OK, by now I think I knew I had blown a tire, but the was it a steer tire? It had all been kinda muffled, but it had seemed to be below me, on my side. Then again I was sitting high up and at highway speed with my windows closed, so I couldn't yet discern the position exactly. But here we were about to swerve to the left again, and the left lane is crowned to the left, and if we start to get the whiplash effect with a blown steer tire on the left then we may be going off the road, and into the steep embankment, at 80-something MPH...

Fortunately, the swerve did NOT continue to worsen, so by now -- oh, about 1.5, 2 seconds into the whole thing -- the rig was under control, and I was almost positive we had not lost a steer. Still, I resisted the urge to stand on the brakes in case that would throw off any balance we still had. I had let off the accelerator, and while nearly 80K lbs. does have quite a bit of momentum, the truck also has a lot of frontal area to push through the air, and the road was flattening up ahead and even beginning a modest climb. Without any more oomph from the engine we began to slow down, and I had already well cleared that camper, so I oozed it all over to the right, and as far into the breakdown lane as I could.

A quick look in the driver's-side mirror and holy mackerel! A trail of debris that had to be a half-mile long, and about a half-mile back. There were a lot of black pieces which were probably tire shrapnel, but lots of other stuff that I had yet to identify. And anyway, first things first; gotta set the brakes, then get the reflective emergency triangles and put them out there. Call for assistance afterwards.

On a divided, two-way road, DOT specs call for placement of emergency signals at intervals of 50, 100 and 200 feet towards oncoming traffic -- remember that the next time you see a guy with the three triangles all within about 50 feet of his bumper! The suggestion is to begin walking with your truck between you and the traffic, so you're not standing just inches away as vehicles go whizzing by. I exited on the passenger side and did all that, and since I did not see any blown tires, the blowout had to be on the driver's side, which meant that I still had not seen it. Nor the fallout.

Placed the triangles, got back to the truck, walked down the passenger side again then around the front. Was correct that it hadn't been the steer tire; nor was it the first drive axle tire, also known as "Axle 2". No, it was on Axle 3, the rear-most drive axle, and oh... my...

What little remained of the tire was what had (apparently) been the outer tire wall. It looked a little like a big, thick strand of pipe cleaner wrapped around a cylinder: torn, shredded rubber with steel wires sticking out of it, all pressed up against the outer edge of the now-exposed, gleaming, giant super-single wheel. (Somehow, mercifully, the wheel itself did not seem to have come into any contact with the roadway -- I could not see any damage on its edges.) The rest of the rubber was out there as the black dots way the heck back up the road.

But that wasn't all. There had been a DOT-mandated, hard rubber mud flap, mounted on a metal arm hanging off of the frame rail. GONE. No sign of the flap, of the metal arm, or even the little brackets the arm would drop in to.

That still wasn't all: this was a newer truck, model year 2019, and it had all of the aerodynamic add-ons to assist with fuel economy. Between the two drive axles there was a "vane" that served to direct airflow past the wheels. It was made of very sturdy, extruded plastic, sort of like a picnic cooler. You could probably break a picnic cooler by bashing it with something hard and sharp, or throwing it down onto pavement from over your head, but otherwise we'd agree it is pretty durable. This vane was connected to the rig by a solid, perhaps half-inch thick aluminum arm welded onto the truck's frame.

Here, again: GONE. Forget about the vane -- that had been ripped off by disintegrating rubber and tossed into the jet stream. But even the aluminum arm had been sheared right off at about its halfway point, leaving a jagged, pointed finger of metal protruding outwards. YIKES!

All for now, gang, all for now!

-- Sincerely,
The Chief (tm)
a.k.a. The Pacific Standard (tm)