Pat Dawson can't help but notice.
Dawson works at the postal-processing center in Billings, where
every day he encounters truck drivers speaking in foreign
tongues.
Then there were the two drivers he met at an eatery in Red
Lodge. They asked him questions about the menu in halting English,
and told of their longing for a meal from the old country of
Russia.
"Once you kind of tune into that, you start noticing them
everywhere," Dawson said.
In his case, he also wrote about them. Dawson reported for Time
magazine for 25 years, covering topics ranging from the Freeman
standoff in Jordan to Max Baucus to Hardin, "the Montana town that
wanted to be Gitmo."
One of his last pieces, "Trucking in the U.S.A.: Where the
Accent is Russian," appeared in the Sept. 4, 2010, issue. Drivers
speaking Slavic languages, usually Russian, "haven't taken over the
business of cross-country freight trucking by any means," Dawson
wrote. "But at least anecdotally, they are a distinct and growing
presence."
Some come to America out of desperation. Dawson was told that
the trucking business in Russia has gone south, and when men over
35 who can't speak English immigrate to the U.S., the relatively
low-paying job of truck driving is attractive as an easy way to
earn money take care of a family.
But as with all immigrant groups, the language barrier and
acculturation process can lead to problems.
Dawson devoted part of the 3 1/2-page article to the case of
Sergei Buslayev, the 56-year-old Russian truck driver who lost
control of his FedEx truck on Interstate 90 in western Montana in
December 2008 and killed volunteer fireman Jerry Parrick.
Buslayev's initial hearing was postponed until an interpreter
could be found. His brief comments in subsequent hearings were
spoken in broken English. Buslayev was eventually convicted of
negligent homicide, and on Nov. 23 received a 20-year prison
sentence, with 10 suspended.
The owner of the truck Buslayev was driving, Vladimir Kuchukov,
was riding in the cab at the time of the crash. Kuchukov was a
co-defendant in a civil suit filed by Parrick's heirs but wasn't
charged with a crime.
Attorney David Paoli, who helped in the prosecution, said while
Buslayev's English was spotty, Kuchukov could speak no English at
all, at the accident scene and when Paoli interviewed him in a
deposition hearing a year later.
Dawson said one of the frustrations in researching his article
was trying to find out how many foreigners are driving
over-the-road trucks in the U.S. "Nobody really keeps tabs on it,"
he said.
To obtain a commercial driver's license, a person is required to
"read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with
the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals
in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to
make entries on reports and records."
The Time magazine article documented "diploma mills" for
commercial driver's licenses in St. Louis and Pennsylvania, both
geared toward providing licenses to unqualified, often
foreign-speaking drivers.
If non-English-speaking drivers are an issue on Montana
highways, Greg Watson isn't aware of it.
"That's not a significant problem for us," said Watson, the
Missoula district commander for the Montana Highway Patrol. "We run
into the occasional person that claims they're unable to speak
English, but overall it's not an issue for us whatsoever. I can't
think of anything in the recent past where we couldn't communicate
with the driver."
That differs from the experience of Bruce Charles, chief of the
West End Volunteer Fire District in DeBorgia. Charles responded to
the crash involving Buslayev and many others in his six years as
chief.
"What we run into is about one-half of the crashes involve
non-English speakers," Charles said.
"Theoretically these guys must
apply for their license in English, and they must be able to read
and understand the language so they can be safe on the road as a
commercial entity."
Most of the time, however, "they simply don't speak English,
whether they're from the Indian subcontinent and operating out of
Canada, or whether they're eastern European."
It can cause confusion and frustration at accident scenes.
"They say, ‘No speak English.' When you ask them what cargo
they've got, it's ‘I don't know.' And that's very important to us,
because we don't know if we have a hazardous cargo and need to take
certain precautions," Charles said.
"Then you wonder if (the language barrier) is reality or whether
it is simply something they use to hide behind."
