Not The Day We Planned On

The first part of our day was going great.  We locked in a reservation for a place to stay and play for the winter and we only have a two hour drive to get to our next stopover, Mandeville, Louisiana.  Mandeville will be our home base for the next two or three days for day-tripping into New Orleans.  We want to spend some time exploring the Garden District and the historic cemeteries St. Louis Cemetery No 1 and Lafayette Cemetery No 1.

As a bonus, our drive is along some beautiful Gulf Coast scenery.  One of the sights is Mobile Bay.  Interstate 10 crosses the bay towards its north end where it is narrower.  Still, even at the narrow end the bridge is seven miles long.  In addition to being long it is also narrow and crowded.  We had just cleared the ground and were fully over water, and that's where our day took an unwanted turn.

We heard a big FOOMP! sound followed by the tire pressure monitor alarming and flashing lights for the left rear tire of the trailer.  I looked in the mirror and all I could see was huge hunks of tire being slung off the wheel and cars and trucks directly behind me swerving and dodging those rubber missiles in a place where there was not room to swerve and dodge.  I started coasting to a stop (didn't want to use the brakes for fear of locking up the wheel with the blown tire) and easing over into the emergency lane that was wide enough for a compact car, not a dually truck and 8.5' wide trailer.

There would be no getting out and changing the tire, high speed traffic was literally inches away.  No choice but to inch forward in search of the nearest exit.  In the end that exit was five miles and one hour away.  It was an agonizing crawl to the exit, we saw the digital message boards switch to warn drivers of a "disabled vehicle" and for about the last mile an Alabama Service Assistance Patrol (called ASAP) got behind us with all his lights flashing, shielding us from a full-on rear-end collision.  But I was still worried about the damage I may be doing to the wheel of the blown tire, hopefully the other two axles are keeping damaging weight off of it.

5 Tortured Miles

Now at the bottom of the exit and safely off the road we can get out to assess the situation.  Thankfully the wheel was not damaged but I can't say the same for the RV.  One end of the fiberglass fender was shattered and the tread had hit so hard up in the fender well that it knocked about six feet of seam bead loose on the outside where the sidewall meets the fender skirts.

But at this point there is nothing to do except change the tire and get back on the road.  I cranked the spare down and crawled in the dirt to get under the rig and get the spare off its cable.  The ASAP guy stayed with me but he did not have a working compressor for his impact wrench, I used my 4-way and did all ten lug nuts by hand.  Normally it's not a big deal but today is wicked hot with a heat index well over 100 degrees.

Ripped open from rim to rim.  The tread cap came completely off in hundreds of pieces.

Having hydraulic leveling jacks are good for more than leveling the rig.  I also use them to jack it up for tire changing.  The ASAP guy thought that was a pretty handy feature.  The spare is on now and the blowout is cranked up into the spare tire well under the back of the trailer.  Before letting weight down on the spare I check the pressure and am disappointed to find that it has less than half pressure it needs.  Guess I am going to have to be more diligent about manually checking its pressure, or maybe I could add a pressure monitor to it too.

At first it would seem that my situation had not improved.  The tire pressure is far too low to drive on and the emergency services truck's compressor was on the fritz.  But the next thing I know the ASAP guy is on the radio calling for a truck with a working compressor.  In less than 10 minutes I was getting aired up.  A great big THANK YOU to ASAP.

Alabama Service Assistance Program (ASAP) to the rescue.  Getting the air
that my spare needed.  That's the Bay Bridge in the background.

Nerves a bit worse for the wear and RV body damage that will have to be addressed in the near future, we are back on the road.  The last two miles of Mobile Bay Bridge were done with regular traffic and normal speed (normal speed for us is never above 65 mph with trailer in tow).  It is about an hour and a half to our destination.  We are hours past when we had expected to be in Mandeville.  It is mid-afternoon and we'll be lucky to get to the campground and checked in before the office closes.

It has been nearly an hour, we have passed Biloxi, MS and approaching Gulfport when there is a large FOOMP! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!.  Again the tire pressure monitor begins wailing and lights flashing.  I look in the mirror and see another blown tire, only this time instead of chunks of rubber flying off I see a fender and body panels ripped loose and flapping in the breeze.

The tread cap did not come completely off with this blowout.
Instead it stayed on and slung around and beat the crap out of everything.

This time the tire on the front axle has blown.  We are very close to an exit so again we creep down the emergency lane for about 500 yards to the exit ramp and then onto a large sandy lot at the end of the ramp.  Surveying the damage is heart breaking.  Our beautiful home took a beating, the fender is hanging on by one screw.  That's ten feet of custom molded fiberglass ripped loose from a half dozen anchors and sagging out about three feet from the side.  At least three fender skirt panels have been ripped loose and the seam bead damaged earlier is really a mess now.

First things first.  It's mid-afternoon, there is no spare, we are going to have to get this second blow-out off and the first blow-out down from the spare mount and find a tire shop pronto.  Luckily there was a Goodyear place nearby and they had a match for my tires in stock.  We hustled on over and they got to us right away.

Back at the sand lot and we are getting all the new rubber on.  We removed the one last screw holding the fender and put it in the only place it would fit, the "hallway" leading from the galley to the bedroom.  A liberal amount of duct tape was used to secure the loose fender skirts.

With everything secure it was time to hitch the truck back up and try one more time to get to Mandeville.  We have a safety checklist that we follow rigorously when hitching.  One of the steps in the checklist is to do a pull test.  This is where the hitch is tested to be sure the jaws have closed and fully locked around the kingpin.  The landing gear is raised just enough to put the full weight of the trailer on the hitch with about an inch of clearance between the landing gear pads and the ground.  The trailer brakes are then locked and an attempt is made to pull the truck forward.  If all is good there is no separation between the hitch and kingpin and the truck doesn't/can't move an inch.  You then fully retract the landing gear and go on your way.

The pull test is all we have left to do before getting back on I-10 and to our destination that is no more than 30 minutes away.  Cyndee is at her position outside where she has a good view of the hitch and I am in the truck.  I actuate the brakes, put the truck in gear and let my foot off the brake.  To our surprise everything just rolled forward, no resistance at all.  That's not normal!

Typically when I actuate the hydraulic trailer brakes the hydraulic pump makes a distinct noise as it pressures up.  I did not hear it but being inside the truck with the motor running, I usually don't.  So I got out and asked Cyndee if she heard it.  The answer was an emphatic No!  Uh-oh.

 Given that the last blowout had the tread cap still attached and flailing around tearing hell out of the fender and body it may have also damaged a brake line.  It was not obvious because I saw nothing with the wheel off so I crawled under and started inspecting all the brake lines on all the axles.  Sure enough the brake line on the center axle had been ripped completely out of its fitting where it connects to the caliper.  This short day just keeps getting longer and longer.

By now it is way too late to get this kind of repair work done, we have to find a place to stay for the night and get on it first thing in the morning.  Our GPS is built by Rand McNally and designed specifically for RVers.  We punched up the menu for finding campgrounds near our location and got a hit for a place barely a mile from us.  A mile on side streets without trailer brakes is doable.

It has been an unbelievably hot day with tons of stress and a physical endurance test of tire changing.  By the time we get registered and in our spot for the night it is all I can do to get unhitched and the power hooked up for the air conditioning.  Cyndee found an ad for a mobile RV service and we called and got on their schedule for first thing in the morning.  But that's it, we're done.  We'll let the A/Cs do their thing while we collapse in our recliners to rest up enough to go get in bed.