Land Line Magazine comes to the rescue of stranded Arrow truckers

MODOT photo

​Arrow Trucking Co. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, unexpectedly went out of business last Tuesday, leaving more than 1,300 truckers stranded on highways all over the country. Dispatchers for Arrow ordered their truckers to immediately drop their rigs off at the nearest Freightliner dealership, where they could pick up a bus ticket to get home.

But truckers on international routes found that Arrow had deactivated their fuel cards the previous night, stranding some without enough fuel to get to the nearest dealership.

Calls from desperate truckers started pouring into the offices of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), headquartered in Grain Valley, Missouri. The sad luck stories also flooded the press room of OOIDA's trade publication, Land Line Magazine.

Boooo!

Hissssss!

​Land Line's news clerk, Kerry Evans-Spillman, tells The Pitch, "We just looked at each other like, 'Huh? We gotta do something.'" She says she and the staff took to the 'Net, creating a Facebook fan page for stranded truckers that explained their plight, and created a central point of contact. The page encouraged Facebook users to post their contact information if they thought they could provide resources to a stranded driver near them, and stranded truckers posted information regarding their whereabouts. Land Line's senior editor, Jami Jones, went on trucking radio shows Tuesday night and the following Wednesday to draw traffic to the Facebook page.

"The truckers took it from there," Evans-Spillman says. When she spoke with The Pitch last Wednesday, the day-old Facebook site had already attracted 1,645 fans and more than a thousand messages from people offering to help drivers get home. As of this morning, the page's fan base has ballooned to 5,770.

"We're not usually surprised by  generosity, but when people started rallying, this time it really grabbed us," Evans-Spillman says. "We've gotten four or five truckers back to their families already."

Land Line is posting updates on its blog.