{"id":915,"date":"2020-05-19T14:57:12","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T14:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/?p=915"},"modified":"2020-05-19T14:57:13","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T14:57:13","slug":"lb3-humbled-by-major-state-safety-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/other-news\/2020\/05\/19\/lb3-humbled-by-major-state-safety-award\/915\/","title":{"rendered":"LB3 Humbled by Major State Safety Award"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Al Muskewitz
<\/strong> 
WEDOWEE, Ala. \u2013<\/strong> LB3 has a simple yet award winningly effective approach to trucking safety on the highway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Keep maintanence standards high and treat every car encountered on the road as if it\u2019s your family car with family members inside.
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It\u2019s a philosophy the six-year-old carrier has had from the start of its operation and the reason it\u2019s this year\u2019s safest in-state fleet in Alabama.
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Two weeks ago, LB3 won the President\u2019s Award, the highest honor for a fleet at the annual Alabama Trucking Association Fleet Safety Awards. Its 20-truck fleet recorded zero accidents over nearly a half-million miles within the state of Alabama. Other companies may have traveled more collective miles across the state, but none have had fewer accidents for the miles (477,586). You can\u2019t have less than zero.
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\u201cIt was very humbling to win that award considering the other candidates involved,\u201d LB3 chief operating officer Brian Lindley said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re going up against a lot of these big guys it\u2019s very humbling to win awards like that because you have so much respect for those already who are leaders in your industry, so to be named with those is a very humbling thing.
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\u201cOne of the things I\u2019ve always told drivers and (wife) Valerie told them during training is you treat every vehicle like your family\u2019s in it; you want to be that safe. That is our main slogan.\u201d\u00a0
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The company has been recognized by the ATA and ATA Comp Fund for its safety awareness and accident prevention efforts ever since forging a relationship with the organization in 2016. Of course, there have been incidental accidents, but only one reportable incident over the last two years. It has never had a personal injury accident.
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It\u2019s not difficult to understand. Besides talking the talk, the carrier rotates its fleet of Freightliners and Internationals regularly and keeps the shop stocked with readily available parts for whenever it\u2019s necessary to replace a piece \u2013 even before it\u2019s time to change it. And when a mistake does occur, they all learn from it and move forward.
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\u201cThere\u2019s a reason they call them accidents \u2013 things happen \u2013 but you never want to get into a critical situation to where you push the limits; you want to have a good program involved,\u201d Lindley said. \u201cWhen it comes to our trucks and trailer safety, there\u2019s just really no excuses for worn brakes or worn tires. DOT guidelines are minimum. You shouldn\u2019t be running your company where you\u2019re just trying to skirt around the minimums.
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\u201cSet your own standard or safety. You don\u2019t want to set your standards to the lowest that they can be. When you set your standards at a high bar you can then kind of start forging your business into an upper echelon kind of deal. In this business if you stop you will get run over. You cannot stop. You\u2019ve got to keep moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘I’m sorry, but you are in the trucking business’<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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LB3 COO Brian Lindley talks about his<\/strong>
company’s beginnings and its approach<\/strong>
to safety in his office in Alabama. <\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lindley didn\u2019t start out to operate a trucking company.
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He was actually in the chicken business, Laid Back Farms, raising breeding hens in rural Randolph County; the newly built LB3 maintenance shop and yard is located where the chicken houses used to be. That much inventory produces\u00a0a lot<\/em> of litter and something has to be done with it. Soon, he started a side business moving the waste as fertilizer, but it takes some wherewithal to move that much by-product.
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His business partner suggested they invest in a truck and trailer. Lindley didn\u2019t know the first about the trucking end of it and called around the county for insight and advice. The conversation typically started \u201cI\u2019m not in the trucking business, I\u2019m in the litter business, but \u2026\u201d and as he explained the situation the voice on the other end interrupted to say, \u201cYoung man, I\u2019m sorry, but you are in the trucking business.\u201d
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From those humble beginnings, LB3 has grown into an operation with 20 trucks delivering refrigerated fresh poultry and paper products to markets primarily east of the Mississippi.\u00a0
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If he was going to be in the trucking business, he was going to do right by his drivers, his staff and his customers. He started a relationship with the Alabama Trucking Association and its programs and have been moving forward ever since.
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\u201cYou started realizing then there\u2019s more to this than just trucking,\u201d Lindley said. \u201cThere\u2019s a safety aspect of it that you\u2019ve got to be mindful of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A ‘willingness to evolve’<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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LB3 trucks line up in preparation<\/strong>
for hitting the road later in the day. <\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

On this particular day, Lindley was meeting with the company\u2019s safety and compliance consultants, Transafe LLC, discussing, among other items, the merits of forward- and rear-facing cameras for accident documentation, assets that could have made a difference in the resolution of that 2018 reportable accident on its record.
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Joel Garrett, the consultant working the account, said when he started working with LB3 about a year ago the carrier’s safety program already was \u201cabove average\u201d within the industry.
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The key to its safety success, he said, has been its \u201cwillingness to evolve.\u201d
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\u201cThey were already knowledgeable in a lot of it because they had trial by fire,\u201d Garrett said. \u201cThey had already been through a compliance review, so that\u2019s where you get baptized by fire into the rules and regulations and the cost of not being compliant. They already had some structures in place.\u201d
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The proof is in the various awards they display in the company offices, which Lindley converted from his grandmother\u2019s farmhouse. They\u2019re going to have make room for its biggest award yet.
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LB3 drivers will put their safety skills on display next month when the carrier hosts its own version of the canceled state and national Truck Driving Championship. It’s part of Lindley’s way to reward his drivers for a job well done during some difficult and demanding times.
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Al Muskewitz is the Editor of Wright Media. He can be reached at\u00a0<\/em>musky@wrightmediacorp.com<\/em><\/a>
<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Al Muskewitz WEDOWEE, Ala. \u2013 LB3 has a simple yet award winningly effective approach to trucking safety on the highway. Keep maintanence standards high and treat every car encountered on the road as if it\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[152,248,251,151],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":927,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions\/927"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiremaster.com\/trucking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}