ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

A barrage of ice and snow storms Christmas week brought truck, train and air shipments in the Midwest to a halt, cut power to 500,000 residents and businesses in several states and left a layer of glaring ice on pavements from New Mexico to Arkansas.

This was the year you’ll tell your grandchildren about. The presidential election of 2000 is one for the history books, and for all the sturm and drang about premature media calls on the outcome, hanging chads and legal contests at every level, the experience told volumes about the strength of the American system of government and our faith in it.

Y2K ended for trucking, not with a digitally-induced apocalypse, but with two super-mergers, one for each of the two major sectors of the industry, truckload and less-than-truckload.

Two late-year merger announcements in trucking made a splash on Wall Street in 2000, a year marked otherwise by stagnant or falling stock prices due to concerns that high fuel costs and transportation equities are a bad mix.

After years of study and months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the Department of Transportation unveiled a proposal for reforming hours-of-service rules for truck and bus drivers.

The new millennium picked up where the old one left off, with diesel prices heading skyward. Fuel costs reached new heights in 2000, and the impact was felt throughout the economy, especially by those who operate or build big trucks.

It was a year of decision for independent conferences and professional councils affiliated with American Trucking Associations.

Diesel, the lifeblood of the trucking industry, was under the microscope of the Environmental Protection Agency in 2000, with the most sweeping changes occurring late in the year when the agency issued its fuel rules for 2006.

Workplace safety regulations that would cover more than 100 million people at 6 million workplaces will become the law of the land in 2001 unless the new president or the courts see it differently.