DC: High Fuel Prices Cause 'Crippling Effect' for Truck Firm

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DC: High Fuel Prices Cause 'Crippling Effect' for Truck Firm

By Kenneth Bredemeier Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday , September 17, 2000 ; H01

The price of crude oil drilled from the depths of the earth is at a 10-year high. For Ronald Cooper, vice president of his brother's trash-hauling firm in Woodbridge, that has proved to be a major headache.

GDC Inc., owned by Gerald Cooper, has a fleet of 140 trucks, 90 tractor-trailers it uses to haul huge quantities of trash for BFI Waste Systems to large landfills in southern Virginia and 50 dump trucks it rents locally.

With such a collection of trucks, GDC consumes 7,500 gallons of diesel fuel a day and has watched with dismay as the price of crude has risen, driving up the cost of one of its derivative products, diesel fuel.

Ronald Cooper said the firm now pays $1.54 a gallon for diesel, 47 cents more than it was paying a year ago. That translated into a $232,917 fuel bill last month, up more than $70,000 from the $161,677 tab in August 1999.

"It tends to have a crippling effect," Cooper said. "If it goes to $1.70, we might be out of business and have to lay off 200 employees."

Cooper said GDC, under a contract with BFI that has three more years to run, is prohibited from adding a fuel surcharge to its bill for carting Washington and Baltimore area trash to downstate Virginia.

But GDC has implemented a surcharge--at the moment, 8 percent--to the $55-an-hour charge for renting its dump trucks, pushing the cost to $59.40.

"When you crunch the numbers," he said, "we're very, very concerned. People a lot smarter in the trucking business than my brother and I have lost their businesses."

So who does he blame for the rising cost of diesel?

"It's really clear to me there's no energy policy coming out of Washington," he said. "Now we have to go hat in hand to the Middle East to get more oil. There should have been somebody paying closer attention to what our fuel policy is. I can't tell them what went wrong. This country runs on fuel. Somebody has been asleep at the wheel."

He described himself as a reluctant supporter of Texas Republican Gov. George W. Bush for president. "I'm not wild about either [Vice President Gore or Bush]," he said, but added, "It's time to let the other guy steer for awhile."

http://washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=wpni/print&articleid=A21132-2000Sep16

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), September 17, 2000

Answers

This is an up-cloe, personal snapshot of what's going on out there.

This guy is absolutely right. There has been no semblance of any National Energy Policy coming out of the White House for the past eight years.

-- Uncle Fred (dogboy45@bigfoot.com), September 17, 2000.


I find this to be an excellent personal interest story.

-- Nancy7 (nancy7@hotmail.com), September 17, 2000.

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