A legislative committee has approved a bill that would require California trucks to carry a device to enable police to stop the vehicles and to mark the exterior of trucks to show how the device works.

According to Howard Posner, a consultant for the Transportation Committee, AB575 is designed to keep certain hazardous materials out of the hands of terrorists. The bill passed the Assembly Transportation Committee April 29 by a vote of 16-0.

“It’s only going to apply to flammable materials, radiological isotopes and a very small list of essentially materials that terrorists might use, like botulism or anthrax or mustard gas, stuff like that,” he said.

The proposal has raised concerns among some in the trucking industry.

Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said “If you wanted to provide a blueprint for destruction to terrorists, this would be the way you would do it.”

For example, potential truck hijackers could simply read the instructions for the bumper device printed on the truck and use the method to disable the vehicle.

Some truckers have expressed their concerns directly to state officials.

“I’ve sat in meetings with truckers who said ‘hey, this will help folks hijack our trucks’,” Posner said. The truckers are not absolutely wrong, he added, and the California Highway Patrol has examined the issue.

“It would give them a potential means of stopping a truck, but then they would have to figure out how to deactivate the device,” Posner said. “Since hijackings tend to take place in a fairly quick time frame, you’re probably not going to want to hijack a truck that you have to then get underneath and fiddle around with some mechanism to move it again.”

“The answer is yeah, that’s a problem, but law-enforcement doesn’t think it’s a big problem.”

In Southern California, reports of truck hijackings have risen steadily over the past five years. The region is popular to thieves because of the number of ports, interstate highways and warehouses. Nationwide, cargo thieves will steal an estimated $12 billion to $20 billion in goods this year.

The majority of cargo thefts are simple jobs where one or two thieves will hijack or steal a truck, sometimes without even knowing what’s inside. Police say cargo theft is on the rise because more money can be made in stolen cargo, and the penalties are much lighter than in drug crimes.

The bill would require every truck covered to have some kind of disconnect device – an external mechanism that would either activate the brakes or cut off the fuel to the engine. The device would have to be built in a way that would allow Highway Patrol officers to activate it from the outside of the truck.

“You could use any number of technologies,” Posner said. “There’s one that attaches to the rear bumper where if a police car chasing you hits your bumper it activates your brakes. There’s another where the patrol car might carry some sort of laser gun that deactivates your fuel supply. There’s another that operates through GPS where your own carrier if you call them and let them know you’ve been hijacked they can cut off your fuel supply.”

The original text of the bill would require markings on the outside of the truck “to identify the activation method of the [disconnect] device.” That marking might be “a letter or symbol designated by the department.”

“We suggest state officials go back to the drawing board,” Spencer added. “This idea didn’t pass the laugh test when it was floated once before.”

AB575 also contains a requirement for GPS tracking devices that would allow carriers to find a truck’s location at any time.

The bill is now headed to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. If it passes that panel, it will likely head to the Assembly floor for a final vote in that chamber and head on to the Senate.

--by Mark H. Reddig, associate editor

Mark Reddig can be reached at mreddig@landlinemag.com.