Episode 173: Fleet Horror Stories: Fires, Failures & Frozen Garbage Trucks #fleetmanagement #fail

This is the Fleet Success Show dedicated to helping you and your fleet succeed using the experience of fleet professionals and Hall of Fame fleet legends. The show that explores how the pillars of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management all combine to lead your fleet to success. We're glad you're here. Now let's get into the show. All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show with your hosts, Josh Turley, Steve Salzgiver.

Hey there. It's been a while.

I feel like you don't need an introduction. But for any of our listeners who somehow skipped over the first 100 episodes or have never, you know, maybe they're new to Fleet or something, give me like the brief 30-second rundown of the legendary Steve Saltzgiver.

Automower Fleet Magazine, Government Fleet called me the fixer of fleets. So that's kind of in a nutshell what I am. I've worked in probably half a dozen fleets in my career, taken them from pretty poor to functioning. I think that's probably my claim to fame, how I got into the Hall of Fame, how I became Legendary Achievement Award winner. Worked in almost every discipline, everything from transit to school bus to city to state to private. So I've managed fleets in all different channels, areas. So that helps, I guess, in my career. I even built trucks when I started, so I did that too.

Man.

I even sold cars.

Sold cars, bought cars, you did a full cycle.

Been over the mark, all over the place, yeah.

If I remember, so State of Utah, State of Georgia, Republic, and Coca-Cola were like the big four. But obviously like West Jordan City and several others along the way. Southern, what was the other one? The university, were you at a university?

No, Utah Transit.

Transit, there you go.

Utah Transit Authority.

Okay.

Although I was over the University of Utah.

All right.

I was at State of Utah.

And the State of Georgia. Oh, you were over University of Georgia? Yeah. In Athens, nice. So you've been around. And one of the things that I know, you know, I've only been, I've been here at RTA, what, 20 years? There's just a lot of fun stories, right? And I get a chance, part of our onboarding here at RTA that I've kind of shifted around is I get the opportunity to meet with all of our new hires and I tell them like the story so far. Here's where we've been. Here's, you know, like when I took over and all the stuff we went through. And here's where we're going, right? But it's really fun to kind of rehash some of the old horror stories and, oh man, you would not believe the time that this happened. And you kind of see their eyes light up a little bit like, what? You did that? Or you went through that? And I know there's a lot of fleet managers out there who have these kind of stories and they're epic. You listen to 'em, you're like, oh my gosh, that's so cool. Or that's crazy. But I know you've got some stories. We've shared some of them in the Fleet Success Playbook. I've heard some of 'em on the podcast, but We thought it would be fun to kind of go through and be like, wow, what does somebody who's, you know, a career spanning like yours, some of your favorite stories from Fleet? Horror stories, you know, just like you wouldn't believe the stuff that I've seen kind of stories. Then things that you just look back on, you're like, that was actually really funny.

Yeah, there's a lot of them. Frankly, I wish I would've kept a better journal. Okay. Because I think, and that's what I would tell people as they're coming up through the ranks, you know, Well, go home and write your day, you know, write down in your day, your fleet. Because there's, I know there's a lot of them that I have that I can't even remember anymore. But a couple funny ones, and I did say this in the Fleet Success book. One, when CDLs first came out, we were training people on how to do walk-around inspections. And so as a supervisor at a city, I was not only training, but then I had to do quality checks. And I took a streets guy one day and he came running in. He was so proud, a big smile on his face. He showed me the checklist. Yeah, I checked this out and everything. And my first question was, well, let's go out there, you know, we'll do a quality check and we'll see how you did.

You totally see this guy is like, hey, Dad, I did it, I did it. He's all like giddy and everything.

And I said, did you open the hood? This was on a GMC Top Kick, which is a Class 6 vehicle, Class 7 vehicle. He said, oh yeah, yeah, I checked the oil, I checked the belts, I checked everything. So I opened the hood up up to quality check it, right there, very first thing to see was a little teeny bird nest on the radiator with 3 eggs in it. And I said to him, and I noticed he didn't write that up. And he just kind of tipped his head down and said, "You know, I guess I really didn't check under the hood." So I thought that was kind of funny. And it was a good life lesson why you need to check under the hood because I mean, if it wasn't 3 bird eggs, it could have been a broken belt, it could have been an oil leak, it could have been something else.

I've seen raccoons, right? Just any kind of number of stuff get caught up in that. I've seen everything.

I mean, I've seen Republic Services. I mean, I remember working there. We had rats eating the wires under the garbage trucks in some of our southern states, you know, and you go out there and their truck wouldn't start. That's what happened. Some rat ate a loom.

Well, you know, they've got extra flavoring, so naturally they'd want to do that.

That's crazy. But yeah, I've had a lot of funny ones. I had one where a public safety fleet officer came into the shop and it's hard to explain this. I'm just going to say Picture this vehicle driving in the shop and it's going thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, like this. Well, I go over to him and I said, "What in the heck did you do?" All his 4 tires were ground down.

Oh my goodness.

Now, if you know what a police vehicle, they all have high-speed rated tires and they're soft. Well, he was trying to go 100 miles an hour to get up to top speed out on a real rural road. And a deer ran in front of him. So he just slammed on the brakes and he ground off the tires.

Oh my goodness. Yeah.

So that was pretty funny, but inexpensive.

Oh, for sure.

Tires, those are Goodyear high-speed rated tires. So those are kind of some of the funny ones. Some of the not so funny ones, if people remember back in 2014, I think it was '14, maybe '15, early '15, we had a polar vortex. And I flew out to Pennsylvania because it was extremely cold there and I had all these garbage trucks stranded on the side of the road. And, uh, what had happened is we had natural gas vehicle engines in those and they'd all froze up and the dispatcher couldn't get them out. And he was actually in tears, which showed me how serious he took his job. But I ended up having to ground the entire CNG fleet because it turned out to be a manufacturer problem defect. And that wasn't funny because CNG at that time was really high profile. And our CEO was after us to get more and more of those. And I got called into the office of my CFO at that time, or COO, operations officer. And he said, who in the hell shut down the program?

Yeah, this is our brand.

I went, me. Why did you do that? You know, going through all that. And I said, well, this is what happened. This is where we are. You know, I explained to him and he said, oh, okay, well, let's get this fixed right away. So anyway, long story short, we got it fixed in pretty short order because I had the now the COO and the CEO. And we're getting on a call with, you know, with the manufacturer, Kyle, or whoever it is. And all it was is reposition a sensor. That's all it was. Oh, because as a truck would drive down the street, it would be right behind the radiator and it would freeze up. So they just had to move it so it wouldn't take in that air. That was that simple. Um, had another story that was— wasn't really funny, but crazy. We had Class 7 trucks at one of the beverage companies I worked at where the turbos kept catching on fire. Yeah, they would leak onto the engine and it'd ignite the entire truck. And so we had all these trucks, so I mean, I think we lost 20 or 30 trucks. And so we had the manufacturer come in, we grounded all the trucks because they were, you know, basically a volatile nightmare until we could get that fixed. And then we actually did get that fixed.

But could you just imagine like, you know, 20 or 30-year trucks just spontaneously combusting? You're not sure what's going on. You're like, what is happening?

Oh, it was crazy. And it was, all it was is a little seal in a turbocharger that kept breaking, you know, leaking.

It was just leaking all the oil out.

All over the engine. The engine's hot and ignites the whole thing. Yeah. Probably one of the most serious stories I've ever had was I was up in the Midwest states and it was in the winter. And we had a fleet manager that reported to me. I had at that time like 200 fleet managers reporting to me. And I went up there to do a quality check, which was kind of an adjunct to the real story, but it was a quality check. And I'd do that. I'd fly to all these different spots and make sure they're doing the right maintenance. Anyway, long story short, I left that area. But during that particular spot, I noticed there was a brake can hanging off. And I said, that's really bad quality. You need to get that fixed. You can't have that. It was going out the gate like that. That. So we, we kind of rode up and chastised the manager there and said, look, you got to do a better job than that. Anyway, I got— no sooner got back than, uh, one of our trucks was involved in a very serious accident with fatalities. And what had happened was they'd actually inspected the truck in December of that year on a PM inspection, like normally you would do. They was checking the brake linings and he's checking the tires. Well, the tires were less than 2/32. They were basically bald. You got to have at least 4/32 on tires. Well, what happened is it's okay to catch that on a PM, but what they didn't do is fix it. So what happened is in January, I was involved in a head-on collision because they were on a snowy road in Iowa, and the, uh, the vehicle killed a family. Oh man. And that was a million dollars— millions of dollars by the time we got out of that mess. But long story short, that particular manager didn't last. That's— I mean, those are the serious things that you just lose your job over. There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And it really brought home the importance of, you know, doing the actual maintenance that you have to do. I mean, we're in a life and death business if we don't do it right.

Little changes, little shortcuts, things like that.

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I remember you told a story about the tie rod. Oh yeah. In a very similar situation, could have happened, right? Yeah.

And that happened to me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and you know, so yeah, I'm very cautious when it comes to those kind of things. Especially when you're working on heavy-duty equipment. The tie rod was on a bus, thousands of pounds, you know, that can do a lot of damage to a small car. Um, yeah, all of a sudden you can't steer, you know, because the tie rod popped out and your one tire is going over here, the other one's going straight.

Hopefully it'll just stop.

But, uh, yeah, in that particular case it actually stopped into the curb, so it actually worked to my advantage. But if that would have harmed anybody, I would have lost my job over that because I had actually screwed on the nut And I asked the guy that followed me on swing shift, "You need to torque that nut." He got busy, didn't do it. Both of us got in trouble. Taught me two lessons. One is you don't not finish a job. And the other lesson is don't depend on the guy that's following you to do what you told him to do. So other things, you know, I mean, if you're in the garbage disposal business, garbage trucks burn up all the time. That's a common occurrence.

Hot load coming in.

Yeah, they'll get caustic acid base, garbage loads and you got hoppers on fire. Had CNG garbage trucks burning up and blowing up all the time. You know, that happened— well, I shouldn't say all the time, but it happened occasionally. Um, gosh, there was so many crazy things that happened when you're in this business.

It's like, you know, if nothing's crazy happened, you're not doing it right. Yeah, it's crazy.

So that's what I tell people is make sure you record it. And, you know, on sit back, think about it, laugh at it if you can, you know, if it's a funny story. Those are the things that get you actually through life and the other difficulties that you have when you're—

you learn from it what you need to learn from it. But otherwise, you know, hey, you survived it and be proud of that, be happy with that.

And that I would say, you know, take responsibility if it's your responsibility, you know.

I mean, don't shy from it.

Yeah, I shared a couple instances where I screwed up. I took responsibility for it. Thankfully, and people appreciate that. Your boss, if you come out and ask you who did that and you say, me, point a finger at me, I did it, then they're usually a lot easier on you. It depends on how serious the issue is, but they want someone that admits to it and doesn't give them a bunch of excuses of why it happened. So I've always learned that was something that I could easily do. And it taught me a lot in life. I mean, you know this and we've talked a little bit about it. I've walked away from jobs. Where I've had bad management. I mean, that in itself is another story, a personal story. I worked at a place for 15 years, had 5 kids, a mortgage, and a car payment, and didn't like my boss and left that quick.

Just jumped.

Just jumped.

Wow.

Went home. My wife said, "What in the hell? What did you do?" And that's how I ended up selling cars, actually. I ended up walking down the street and started selling cars. Whatever it took to get the job done, right?

Yeah, whatever it took to keep my family.

Interestingly, we didn't lose our house or car or go bankrupt. So I mean, I was very blessed during that time. But it taught me the importance— that was actually of all the moves I've ever made, that story has made my career. And it's interestingly, I mean, that kind of a tragedy. And all it was is I was working for a guy. I had decided to go graveyard shift because I wanted to supervise the night crew. So that I could go back to the University of Utah and get my degree in business. That's all it was. And I kept getting blamed for everything that happened. My crew was blamed for this and blamed for that. And we were, you know, we actually were vindicated several times by other people. So it wasn't really us anyway. One story was a guy was stealing money out of the fare boxes in the buses, you know? And they kept, "Oh, it's that graveyard shift." You know, they're prying open the fare box with screwdrivers and they're taking all the money. Long story short, I kept saying, "No, I'm with these guys all night. They're not doing that." And it turned out it was actually the guy that takes the money out of the fare boxes that was stealing the money.

The one that had the opportunity and the means and the—

Yeah.

Go figure.

Yeah, so anyway, there were so many of those stories, you know? And after a while I'm going, "Okay, I'm not working here with this guy anymore." There is a kind of a weird ending to this story. And 10 years later, the guy that I thought was the jerk that made me actually get up and leave that job after 15 years, Got fired. So karma's real. But the irony of that is he called me on the phone. I was the state of Utah director, and he asked me for a job. So I thought, wow, you know, we always talk about, you know, conversate, you know, those conversations and don't burn the bridge.

Yeah. So you never know when it'll come around again.

Well, here was a case learning for me is that, first of all, for him to call me, I learned right away he didn't know he was a jerk. Yeah, because who would, who would call somebody if you knew you were a jerk to them? So that was something I owned. I probably perceived something that wasn't really there. Um, and then secondly, karma does happen, you know. So that was kind of an interesting story.

Yeah, you mentioned, uh, you know, a couple from, you know, where he had a parts clerk that, you know, was just total, I don't know, a ragamuffin. Just somebody who's not— he didn't want to deal with this guy. Then you had another one, like you had to deal with an employee issue where you had to come and take custody of the person.

Yeah, it was really weird. Two parts instances. Well, one parts guy, he was, for lack of a better word, he was really a, I don't know, I mean, just obnoxious. You know, people would, our mechanics would come to me almost every day saying, this guy is not gonna get, he's not giving me the parts. We got productivity issues 'cause I can't get parts. And it was just stupid stuff. Like people would go there and they would ask for a part, but if they didn't ask using the right vernacular or the right name, he'd say we didn't have it. You know, I mean, one instance I was telling you earlier was a guy went up there to get some of that wire that you could wire something together. And they asked for some wire and he said, "I don't have any wire." And the mechanic was looking over the counter saying, "It's right there behind you. Give me that wire." "We don't have any wire." And he finally, after about 10 minutes of that, he turns around, he says, "Oh, you mean the mechanic wire?" because that's— that was the real name for it, right? On the reel. Just dumb stuff like that.

Like a baling wire type.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't say baling wire.

No, no, no. Yeah.

But, uh, one day that one of the mechanics just got fed up with him and threw a starter at him, you know. And luckily it didn't hit him in the head or anything and cause some severe damage or injury.

Well, the mechanic's lucky because I've had other stories where— so I'm not going to name who it was, but somebody I know very well Right. Goes and grabs a freezer or a burrito out of the fridge.

Oh.

And chucks it at somebody else. Police get called. He gets arrested for, for battery.

Yes.

Because that burrito could have been frozen, and if he had hit her head, then it could have, you know, it could have killed her. Yeah. So it was like attempted murder with the burrito. And I'm like, you told me the story about the starter, and that was the first thing I thought. I was, whoa, that's actually really serious.

Yeah, it is.

You get hit in the head with that, like, you might not wake up.

Yeah. So the other parts story I have that was really crazy is I got called by the police to come pick up a parts employee at my lunch break. The parts employee had gone out Christmas shopping and got arrested for stealing a TV at a large department store. Oh, man. That would not have been an issue for me. The only issue for me is that parts person was wearing the jacket with the logo of the city on it that I work for. And so that became a real issue. Long story short, that actually had a good moral ending to it. We were able to save that employee, single mother, a couple of kids. And I'm still to this day in contact with her, and it turned out to be a good story.

What's crazy about that is that it could have gone the other way very quickly, and you just think about how generational those impacts would have been. Those two kids, that whole situation, how would she have ever come back from that? So it was almost very fortunate that she was wearing that West Jordan jacket.

Yeah.

Because it could have had a very different outcome, you know? You think about, yeah, we've had employees that have shown up drunk. We've had employees that, you know, they get caught stealing. We talk about the logo and the brand sometimes, and they're out driving. Oh man, I'll remember this is one of our clients, their employees were going to strip clubs in the city vehicles. And it's like, you drive by and you're like, whoa, what's all this? You know, they'll just say City of Phoenix. It wasn't City of Phoenix, but you know, all these City of Phoenix vehicles vehicles all sitting over here at the strip club. What is going on? Are they on duty right now? Are they on official business? Like, it was just a very bad look for the city because, you know, their employees were doing stuff that they shouldn't have been doing in public vehicles.

You know what's funny is I prepare for these sometimes, these podcasts, if somebody will ask me or something like, you have all these stories and stuff, but you just reminded me of another story. I had a university vehicle that was, um, a complaint came in, it was sitting at a porn shop.

Oh, nice. Yeah, well, they came back and said, oh, we They're just doing research.

Yeah, university doing research, I guess. But you get those kind of calls all the time, you know, where people park the cars in the wrong spot. Bars are really common.

Oh yeah, yeah, it's just crazy. And you're like, oh, you know, did you drive home? And how many— how much did you drink? And you're kind of a vehicle. And yeah, uh, definitely we got to be careful. We always say the, the loosest knot in any vehicle is the one behind the wheel.

Exactly. Yep.

So you always be careful about that. It's crazy to think about all the different things that people go through. And I, you know, I'd love to hear if you guys have crazy horror stories. I would love to hear them. You know, you can protect the innocent, you know, make it all anonymous, whatever, but send them to me. podcast@rtafleet.com. Would love to hear them because I know people have stories.

I bet we could put together a book of those. It'd be kind of fun across the country. Yeah, maybe the world.

So I've actually been thinking about writing a book just for my personal experience. It's not fleet related, but I call it like culture wars and battle scars, right? You know, like fighting for the soul of the company. 'Cause there was a lot of crap I went through to get to this point. But I know that like, if this is what I went through just in my one business, there's people out there that's got some stuff. They got some real doozies that, you know, if you could top Steve's stories, that would be awesome. You know, I mean—

I'm sure somebody can. Somebody's gonna have some crazy ones out there.

Yeah. Well, you know, like Grandpa had it. He had several where, you know, He had a guy named Porky, which you can't make that up. You know, and that brings you the movie. Yeah, you know, but like he was, you know, show up to work drunk all the time and like they had to send him home and couldn't get his act together. So, you know, and he literally would be working on vehicles while intoxicated. And you want to talk about a safety risk.

Yeah.

How on earth are you making sure that anything gets done? Now, some people might say, oh, I actually work better when I'm a little buzzed. In this case, it was a massive issue because he was actually really slow and very— you know, I'm not going to say lazy, but his productivity was terrible because he was just intoxicated. He couldn't see anything. He was tripping over stuff. It was a massive issue.

I had a guy one time, for all intents and purposes, you could probably call him a ragamuffin kind of guy. But he would come to work and I swear he never bathed. And he had this odor wafting all around him as he's wandering around. Well, one of the cleaning ladies that cleaned the bus said, I can't work with this guy. So long story short, I had to pull him in, you know, do the whole one-on-one and say, you know, here's a bar of soap. You need to take a shower. You cannot come to work like this.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, he listened to me, but that was one of those supervisor dreadful moments where you got to talk to somebody about their hygiene.

And you're like, nobody ever trained me for this. You know, it's like crazy. This was on the job description.

Yeah, it was nuts. So yeah, you have those. They pop up all the time. If you're supervising people, you're going to run into stuff like that.

People are crazy. Yeah.

Just part of the nature of supervision.

Yep.

Well, cool.

Well, Steve, thanks for sharing some of those with me. I love you're here in office during Spirit Week for us. And anytime we get a chance to kind of pick your brain and just hear— I always talk about sitting at the feet of the master. You are the fleet master. So it's awesome to get to spend some time with you.

Well, thank you. It's always good to be back in Phoenix.

As always, if you guys have questions for Steve, have questions for us, we'd love to answer them on the show. You can email podcast@rtfleet.com. Check out if you want to hear more stories like that. Steve's got a dozen of them in the Fleet Success Playbook. You can go grab a copy of that. Well worth the read, I will tell you. You know, he wrote a significant portion of that book. And so there's really good lessons, even the playbooks. You know, he talks about like the robin's eggs and things like that. Just really good stories and why the plays are necessary. And how to run them well to avoid some of these things that, you know, we talk about the fleet horror stories. But yeah, I would love to have you guys check out a copy of that and connect with Steve on LinkedIn. You know, he's, he's always posting, pretty active. Run into him at a trade show. I will. I love going to trade shows with Steve because it's just like you're walking in the, you know, the dust trails of celebrity. So it's really fun to kind of walk through and just see how approachable he is. And any time you just want to come up, say hi, get to know him, shake his hand. He's really just an amazing guy.

Absolutely. Let me know, reach out to me if you have any issues, problems.

You're gonna be at NAF this year. I think that's our next one we're going to. And so, um, yeah, it's, it's fun.

We do— we— I could probably tell you a dozen funny stories about 100 Best Fleet judging, but we'll leave that there.

We will. We'll do that like with Bill in the room, like, hey Bill, like, this is, this is really funny. And then he might say, we're never airing this episode. But yeah, there's— you've probably seen a lot of that stuff too, just with especially with the advent of AI and just how that's changed. Oh yeah, the judging is— it's got to be very interesting seeing some of the stuff you do.

So it was this year for sure.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that's going to do it for us for this episode. As always, thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Yep.

Thank you.

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