LEXINGTON — Reducing load weights for coal trucks is not the answer to reducing the number of traffic fatalities involving the rigs, says Bill Caylor, the president of the Kentucky Coal Association.

        Federal highway statistics show 21 deaths on U.S. 23 in eastern Kentucky from 1994 through 2000. Coal trucks were involved in more than half the 102 accidents on U.S. 23 involving commercial vehicles in that span.

        “A lot of this is a Catch-22,” said Mr. Caylor. “If you bring the weight down on trucks, you increase the truck traffic. Statistically, the more traffic you have, the more accidents you'll have.”

        Activists disagree.

        Roy Crawford, a Whites burg mining engineer and a coal-truck safety advocate, points to a 1999 study by the University of Kentucky Transportation Center that found 88 percent of coal trucks on U.S. 23 in Lawrence County exceeded Kentucky's 126,000-pound weight limit.

        The center stretched a weight-sensitive cord over the highway and recorded

        the weights of some 19,000 trucks.

        Mr. Crawford assumed the measuring period was a month, and calculated that 228,000 trucks would pass over the same spot in a year. He surmised that if 88 percent of the trucks were overweight, that would be 200,640 overweight trucks.

        Because only 36 overweight citations were written on U.S. 23 in Lawrence County in 1999, that's about 5,573 uncited overweight trucks for every one cited.

        The study did not recommend increased enforcement. It recommended some safety changes and raising the legal weight limit to up to 150,000 pounds.

        In 1997, Gov. Paul Patton told a group of coal operators and haulers in Hazard that the rate of fatal accidents on coal roads is twice as high as others.

        To avoid breaking the law themselves, they contract with truckers, knowing that the truckers will have to carry too much coal in order to stay competitive, Mr. Patton told the group.

        A year later, Mr. Patton proposed a draft bill that would have made coal companies, not haulers, responsible for overweight tickets. Instead of lowering weight limits, however, the bill would have allowed Kentucky's heaviest trucks to legally haul 36,000 pounds more coal.

        The bill was withdrawn before it was filed.

        In the three years after Mr. Patton's proposal, state records show that citations for overweight coal trucks dropped off sharply. In a written response last week, Mr. Patton denied that the state was laying off enforcement on U.S. 23.

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