Posted on 07/25/2017 3:15:00 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
That semi-trailer is a refrigerated unit. That’s a Thermo King unit (circled above) on the front of the trailer. That trailer can carry refrigerated and frozen product. The refer unit has a fully adjustable commercial thermostat. That specific type of trailer is built to haul anything from ice or ice-cream to milk, produce or other perishables that require cold transport; or it can be turned off and just carry any cargo like an ordinary (non refrigerated) trailer.
And yes, the Thermo King unit can, albeit as an unintended use, act just like air conditioning too. It is a fully functional cargo cooling system, which can operate just like your own vehicles’ A/C system. The thermostat on the unit is programmable to whatever temperature you wish to maintain in the trailer.
(Excerpt) Read more at theconservativetreehouse.com ...
Some are reporting it was not working.
Probably costs too much to run the air?
Those vans are pretty tightly sealed up so that sometimes different gasses can be introduced to keep down spoilage or ripening.
Wouldn’t allow for recycling air from the outside.
Yep but was the unit operational or had the guts been stripped out of it?
Supposedly the trailer had been sold to someone else and the driver had
been hired to deliver it. Lots of info not known about this entire episode.
Comments say it was sold with the AC inoperable.
PING
Anyone seen a “for sale” posting for the trailer?
These rigs are often sold on the internet.
Does the seller’s story meet the smell test?
Back in my family’s slaughterhouse days, one of my responsibilities was to check the loaded semi-trailers on the weekends to make sure that the refrigeration units were working. Sometimes the ThermoKing units would get stuck on defrost and heat the load. One time I didn’t check and a whole load of beef cooked all weekend (if memory serves it would have been fifty or so cattle). One of the older guys in the office made me eat a sandwich made out of the rancid meat. Ah memories.
Driver allegedly said he thought he was transporting an empty trailer. And the refrigeration unit was broken anyway.
There is no reason to sell a good working truck to Mexico from Iowa. It had to be a junker.
Why the obsession hereabouts with the reefer?
If it’s not working, it’s not working.
That’s certainly not any kind of sign of a conspiracy.
The truck driver is just your plain old garden-variety murderer and he needs to take the medicine.
There’s no reason to drive a truck in from Mexico when the human cargo was loaded in on this side of the border after crossing the river by raft.
I want to know how this thing came through a border checkpoint undetected!
I am not buying the “My boss was selling it” argument... you would know the difference in weight between an empty trailer and a full one.
The weight had to be over 15,000 pounds, with all those people in it.
Probably costs too much to run the air?
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Those units run on diesel and are limited to a 25 gallon tank... reports were that the unit broke down.
you would know the difference in weight between an empty trailer and a full one.
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15,000 lbs isn’t much ,, full load is about 40K ,, it would not drive any different than an empty trailer... what doesn’t seem right to me is that if this was to be a successful delivery he would have to know the cargo and change his route to avoid inspections and weigh stations (many of them x-ray the trailer) ... and he would get inspected as a supposedly empty trailer would be caught by the scales if it had 15k in it.
Initial report I read on this was the Thermo-King unit was inoperable.
Apparently, it never crossed the border. Survivors indicated they got on the truck in several stops after already crossing the border.
Schaller, Iowa, by the way, is home to Jolly Time and other brands of popcorn.
Iowa is a destination for lots of illegals. Meat packing and livestock.
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