A Castlegar roadside inspector won the High Points Award for Canada at the 2016 North American Inspectors Championship.
Trevor Todd, who works at the Castlegar and Rossland inspection stations, competed in the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s (CVSA) championship in Indianapolis, Indiana in early August, after winning at the 2016 Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement (CVSE) Inspectors’ Challenge in Victoria in June. Todd went up against 48 other vehicle inspectors from all over North America and won second place in the North American Standard Level V Passenger Vehicle (Motorcoach) Inspection.
“What we do is we take the traditional motorcoach that you see travelling up and down the highways, we put it up on ramps, and we actually plant false violations throughout the whole vehicle,” explained Collin Mooney, executive director of the CVSA. “Whether it’s flat tires or low inflation of tires, break defects, suspension defects, any sort of mechanical defects with the controls, such as air rate loss.… We’re judging Trevor and the other inspectors on their procedure and then also whether they’re finding the right violations, and then documenting and cataloguing the violation correctly.”
Todd’s team for the championship — Red Team — also won the team award. Inspectors are randomly assigned to teams at the beginning of the championship, and the winning team is determined by calculating the average score of the team’s members.
“It’s really to see how well they gel and work together as a team,” said Mooney. “Even though all of their events are individual events, there’s a lot of studying and prepping that happens leading up to the Thursday, Friday competition, so they can actually help each other be better inspectors.”
At the end of the championship, Todd also had the highest points of any Canadian inspector and took home the High Points Award for Canada.
The CVSA has been running the championship for 24 years now, and started it to highlight what’s working and where there are areas for improvement in commercial vehicle inspection, and to reward inspector excellence across North America.
“We’re the only association that’s dedicated to commercial vehicle enforcement so we wanted to recognize the folks on the road who were doing a good job, day in and day out,” said Mooney. “When you’re in law enforcement, it kind of tends to be, you don’t get a lot of recognition for a job well done, so this was an opportunity that we had to actually say thank you to everyone that works the road.”
The championship is a partnership between the commercial vehicle industry and law enforcement to improve highway safety, with the industry supplying equipment and some judges for the event.