Nov 20, 2015 2 min read

WAYNESBURG – The natural gas drilling industry might be slowing down, but that hasn’t stopped large rigs from rumbling through Greene County.

In response, state police at the barracks in Waynesburg are training two more troopers to become certified commercial truck inspectors to crack down on violations and overweight rigs.

The barracks currently has two state certified inspectors and is assisted each month by a full-time team based in Fayette County to perform stops and take unsafe vehicles off the roads.

“It still seems overwhelming,” state police Sgt. Steve Dowlin said of the amount of rig traffic traveling through Waynesburg. “You can ask anybody in the county. It still seems very prevalent here.”

Troopers Forrest Allison and James Orbash returned from a two-week state training course last month in Harrisburg and are set to undergo another session soon to become fully certified in the Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program, or MCSAP, that educates police officers how to perform the more detailed inspections.

They will eventually join Cpl. Brian Pitchford and Trooper Duane Spangler, who are already certified and performing those duties.

Those four troopers, however, have other policing duties, Dowlin said, meaning they can’t always be performing inspections. That job falls to a specialized team from Fayette County that spends eight to 10 days here each month and has performed closed to 300 inspections since June, Dowlin said.

“That definitely assists us in our endeavors to combat the increasing truck traffic in the county,” Dowlin said.

Dowlin said he thinks the work in recent months helped decrease the number of serious traffic crashes involving large trucks. He said there is also a need to target overweight vehicles that cross small bridges, alluding to the partial collapse of the Pollocks Mills Bridge in September 2014 when a water truck attempted to cross the 137-year-old span.

“If we’re able to prevent that before rather than after the fact, we’re one step ahead of the battle,” Dowlin said.

The Waynesburg Police Department also has two MCSAP certified officers, who have been performing inspections since June.