And by 'Tatas', I mean the company that manufactures trucks and other vehicles in India [NYSE: TTM]....jeez, get your minds out of the gutter already. You'd think that was a sugestive or misleading headline or something.
Last night marked the debut or the History Channel's IRT: Deadliest Roads where some of the ice road truckers from Alaska and Canada travel all the way to Delhi, India to haul cement and construction supplies to a hydroelectric project in the Himalayas. To get there, they have to traverse the clogged, chaotic streets of Delhi before heading to a narrow mountain road hewn out of the mountainsides with little or no protection from a sheer 1,000 foot drop in many places. The company assigned spotters to each of the drivers (Alex Debagorski, Rick Yemm and Lisa Kelly) not because they're foreigners (although being unfamiliar with the road rules could play a role) but apparently that's a requirement in India to help the driver negotiate congested areas or parts of the roadway with tight clearance.The most experienced truckers in the trio, Alex Debogorski, didn't last one day after getting into two accidents before he even left Delhi....and with some of the driving habits in that part of the world, it would be something of a stretch to say he was at fault. Then again, with 30+ years on the northern ice roads, it's not as though Alex has anything left to prove.
The thing I took away from the first episode was that truckers in India must belong to a particularly despised caste. How else could you explain jamming them into wooden-framed trucks with no air conditioning that wouldn't survive any significant impact and then sending them up mountain roads almost narrower than the trucks?
