Dear Editor:
John and I are on our second trip across country this year in a moving truck. Bigger truck this time, so we get to hang with the semi trucks at the bigger gas stations and what I’ve experienced has me extremely scared about Love’s coming to Spanish Valley. They are insanely loud, they smell incredibly bad and are strewn with trash including pee bottles and poop bags. There were oil, fuel and fluid spills all over the place. The trucks’ air brakes are constantly going off; trucks waiting in line sit idling, waiting for the next available gas pump and continue to idle while pumping gas. The refrigerated trucks are obnoxiously loud to the point that you have to yell to be able to hear someone talking. If a truck stop is busy with semis, the noise and smell is exacerbated by the back up of trucks waiting. The average time these guys spend at any given stop is 20 minutes to an hour or more, depending on if they shower or not and depending on whether there’s a line for showers or if they sleep there overnight. All the while trucks are running, refrigerator units chugging noisily. Imagine that there’s a shortage of employees , the wait will be even longer. Truckers go into register their truck number go back out to gas up then go back in for a company receipt. All the while rigs are running, not all of them but a lot of them idle the entire time. Truckers are inside waiting in line at the register for gas or get receipts, then head over to wait in a separate line to order food or buy things. My point is truck stops are not really quick in-and-outs for truckers. Their gas tanks are huge and they typically are stocking up for the next long run of 2,000 miles. In other words, these truck stops take time for truckers. In the U.S., truckers can drive for 11 hours straight with a required one-hour break; that one hour may be typically spent at one of these truck plazas. The Love’s truck plaza proposed for Spanish Valley has to be stopped. The impacts will be enormous. Love’s will be devastating to our little valley. There are SITLA parcels on Interstate 70; that’s a more appropriate place for a truck plaza.
Kiley Miller
Moab
