A swell of new users and registrants in recent days has caused frustrating connectivity issues for many fleets and drivers trying to use the U.S. DOT’s CDL Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse — a now required step for when carriers hire drivers.
“It’s chaos and no one knows what’s going on,” said one consortium rep, who works with owner-operators and smaller fleets. Drivers have been stalled at drug testing sites waiting for direction, and fleets have been stalled in moving drivers through the hiring process over the technical issues, he said.
The Clearinghouse site launched last October, and fleets and drivers were required to begin using the site as of Monday, Jan. 6. Fleets must query the database for drivers’ CDL numbers whenever making a hire and once a year for current drivers.
The intermittent site connectivity issues prompted the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to post a notice to the Clearinghouse site Tuesday noting that, should fleets experience connectivity issues with the site, they can continue in the hiring process without performing a query now, and then perform a query later once functionality is restored.
An FMCSA spokesperson Monday acknowledged that the Clearinghouse website was experiencing touch-and-go availability and said the agency was working to restore service. The spokesperson would not say how long the agency expected the downtime to last nor would answer questions about how fleets and drivers should navigate the issue until it’s resolved. They did refer to the notice on the Clearinghouse site.
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Lucas Kibby, marketing manager for drug testing consortium CleanFleet, which works with thousands of owner-operators. Kibby says fleets, drivers and owner-operators flooded the Clearinghouse site Monday, many of them “stressed out thinking they had missed the [deadline]” to register, he says. The surge in traffic caused connectivity issues with the site that FMCSA is still trying to fix. As Kibby notes, many drivers and owner-operators aren’t required to do anything with the Clearinghouse immediately, and can wait weeks or months to handle their annual self-check of the system. Likewise, fleets who aren’t hiring any drivers can wait out the technical issues, too, and not worry about the Clearinghouse requirements until they hire a driver or need to run their annual query for existing drivers.
