Thomas Mott Osborne: “What this amendment would do would be to give the State of Nebraska an opportunity to extend its length limits. It does…”

“What this amendment would do would be to give the State of Nebraska an opportunity to extend its length limits. It does not mandate it. It simply gives them the opportunity. It is also important to point out that this is as tight as we can make it. The gentleman mentioned that the length of time would be much of the year. It would actually be the month of July, which is when most all wheat harvest occurs, and also the month of October, which would be for sorghum or milo and also some soybeans. As far as safety is concerned, if it is unsafe in Nebraska, we have got all of the surrounding States, roughly 10 States, that have the length limit of 80 feet. So what is happening now is we are having to decouple the trailer, leave half of it at the Kansas border and then we double up. So we are causing twice the traffic across the State of Nebraska. We have to go back, get the header, take it to the field. Then we leave the header there, go to the next place, drop the combine off, go back and get the header. So what we think we are doing here is we are using way more fuel, causing more traffic. It is more of a safety problem, and we think that this really affects the whole industry. As far as crashes are concerned, there were 4,699 large-truck crashes in 2003, and only 294 of those crashes involved the larger rigs. So we do not think this is a significant factor.”