American Truckers: Our New First Responders

Chet Eby is making sure you will get all of the bacon you need for breakfast, or that thinly sliced prosciutto and provolone sandwich you've been craving. It is a Wednesday afternoon, and the 31-year-old has his young sons, Austin and Evan, with him hauling a load of 20-pound piglets from Cumberland County to Iowa. He is one of millions of road warriors behind the wheel of trucks traveling across the country every hour of every day to make sure the necessities you need and enjoy are available at your local grocers. "I am hauling baby pigs from where they're born in Pennsylvania to the farms where they fatten them out in Iowa," he said from his starting point. "If we don't transport freight, the country comes to a standstill," Eby says matter-of-factly. Pigs have to go somewhere to fatten. From there, they are processed and delivered to grocery stores and butcher shops all over the country in refrigerated trucks. That is where KLLM Transport Services out of Richland, Mississippi, comes in, whose core business is refrigerated transportation. "We have about 4,000 tractor-trailers nationwide with about 25 locations across the country," said Jim Richards, CEO of KLLM. And they haven't stopped moving. There are an estimated 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States, according to the American Trucking Association, which delivers billions of tons of freight from one place to the other every year. CARTOONS | Tom Stiglich View Cartoon In the weeks since the coronavirus has spread across the country, KLLM truckers are the men and women who are making sure perishable foods and pharmaceuticals are delivered across the lower 48 states and Mexico, never stopping or slowing down your ability to get what you need -- despite all of the barriers, restrictions and complications of the coronavirus. Richards was hired by the company straight out of college for its management training program, which included him getting a commercial driver's license and driving across the country with a load. As a future manager, he deeply understood what the life of trucking and hauling meant. Now the biggest change is people not working in the office...MORE