Agency gave safety warnings to trucking firm in Bethpage crash

Months before a big rig killed a mother and her daughter in Bethpage, federal regulators warned the truck's upstate owner to improve its safety record or risk having its fleet banned from the roads, authorities said Friday.

The trucking industry's regulating agency, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, found the owner, California Fruit Markets Inc. of Watertown, to be "deficient" in at least two safety standard categories and gave the firm a "conditional" rating, according to the agency's Web site.

The agency says a trucking firm with such a rating must present a plan to improve their safety or risk losing their privilege to operate. "They were identified as a high-risk carrier," Candice Tolliver, an agency spokeswoman, said on Friday.

Calls to the 15-driver company were not returned.

In Wednesday's chain-reaction crash during evening rush hour at Central Avenue and Hicksville Road, California Fruit Markets' trucker Ryan Draper, 32, broadsided a Pontiac being driven by the mother, Barbara Ryan, 44, with her daughter Joanna, 11, as a passenger, police said.

Several witnesses told Nassau police that the truck went through a red light. Detectives are now doing a reconstruction of the five-vehicle accident. Draper has not been charged.

A funeral for the Ryans, of Bethpage, is to be held Monday at 9:45 a.m. in St. Martin of Tours Church in Bethpage, with burial to follow at Holy Rood Cemetery in Westbury.

The federal government is aware of the crash, Tolliver said.

Using a scale of 0 to 100, with lower numbers indicating a better rating, the safety administration's December 2009 audit of California Fruit Markets showed the company scored 90.71 for driver safety and 94.89 in safety management. A score 75 or higher is considered deficient.

Tolliver said she could not say how often a motor carrier is given a particular rating.

In 2007 congressional testimony, the federal Transportation Department's inspector general said that 36 percent of carriers had a conditional rating or worse in 2004.

Dave Osiecki, a senior vice president at the American Trucking Associations, an industry lobbyist, said about three-quarters of trucking companies score a "satisfactory" rating and that conditional ratings can sometimes be for paperwork mistakes and aren't for egregious violations.

Osiecki said a conditional rating might be issued because "while a company has safety management controls in place, they're not working as well as they should to avoid violations."