(INDIANAPOLIS) — The Postal Service has a problem with its mail trucks: they keep catching on fire.
Incident reports obtained and published by Vice News through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal at least four mail trucks have caught fire in Indiana in the last four years, in Indy, Kokomo, Gary and St. John. It’s a sliver of about 400 fires nationwide — an average, Vice notes, of one every five days.
Paul Toms, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Indianapolis branch, traces the
problems to the Postal Service overhaul passed on a bipartisan vote by Congress in 2006. That law gave the post office more flexibility to compete with private companies on shipping costs — but it also required the Postal Service to pre-fund the next 75 years of workers’ health and retirement benefits. Toms says no other government agency, and few private companies, have that requirement.
Addressing those liabilities cost the Postal Service more than $5 billion a year for 10 years, which
Toms says hasn’t left enough money to replace mail trucks first purchased in the 1980s. The trucks’
official name is LLV’s, for “long life vehicles,” but that long life was estimated at 24 years — the fleet is now several years older than that.
The documents published by Vice show a variety of causes for the Indiana fires. In one case, a worn
battery cable overheated. In another, bits of metal from the turn signal fell into the wiring in the steering column and created an unintended circuit. In the Indianapolis fire, a driver who got stuck in winter ice and snow tried to rock the vehicle out, and the shifting in and out of reverse caused transmission fluid to heat up and leak into the exhaust pipe.
Toms says there have been no deaths in the fires, and he’s not aware of any injuries. But while several reports credit Indiana letter carriers with getting mail out of the trucks when they noticed smoke, Toms says some mail has likely been destroyed.
A written statement from the Postal Service says the agency “has implemented mandated maintenance schedules and fine-tune repair and maintenance procedures for the existing Postal Service vehicle fleet, including LLVs, with the goal of making sure vehicles used by postal employees are safe to operate before they are put into use on a daily basis.”
