Sell your semi truck for cash in Morgan City the easy and convenient way

Two facilities are filed here and both are short on detail in different ways. The first is a barite grinding plant, run by Valence Drilling Fluids with 4 employees — recorded as a metal mine, which it is not, because Louisiana has no barite deposits being worked and the ore arrives rather than comes out of the ground.

The second is a petroleum port 1.54 miles from the centroid, carried as operating, whose operator field reads simply that no name was available. That is recorded rather than filled in from a guess.

That 4-person headcount is the smallest of the five barite plants in the state — against 9 at Cut Off, 16 at Amelia, 22 at Lydia and 25 at Westlake — and it sits in the thick of them. This plant, Amelia and Cut Off cluster within about thirty miles of each other around the Atchafalaya and Bayou Lafourche.

So the hauliers here are competing for drivers with two neighbours running the same commodity on the same water, which is a different market from a plant standing on its own. The freight pattern is common to all five: ore in by vessel and barge, largely imported; bulk pneumatic and sacked product out to the service bases and from there offshore.

And it runs on drilling activity rather than on seasons, so the busy weeks and the quiet ones arrive without much warning.

Whichever gate a truck loads at, what it may carry out is set in one place.

Louisiana does not write one gross figure and stop. Under La. R.S. § 32:386 a combination that carries a tridem or a quadrum axle may run to 88,000 lb on a state-maintained highway, and the interstate system is carved out of that allowance. The condition is the vehicle’s own configuration rather than its cargo or its route — more axles under the load, more gross on top of it.

The harvest permits sit above that again. Off the interstate the harvest-season permit reaches 86,600 lb under the same section; on the interstate a separate permit under La. R.S. § 32:387 reaches 83,400 lb, for farm and forest products in their natural state along with cotton seed moving from the gin to the mill, raw sugar from the mill to the refinery, and brewer’s grain. Sugarcane runs on its own permit to 100,000 lb, and that one has a hardware condition: the trailer carries an additional single axle, six for the combination, so a five-axle rig does not qualify however it is loaded.

Most states that grant a heavy commodity allowance switch it off at the interstate and leave it there. Louisiana instead writes a second, lower permit that works on the interstate, and 83,400 lb is above the federal figure rather than below it.

La. R.S. § 32:386, § 32:387 and § 32:387.7. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.

Beyond the weight, the paperwork is what decides whether a sale closes this week or next month.

The ordinary case is short: we need a title. If it is lost there is a duplicate, and if the truck is old enough that it never had one there is a route for that too. Neither stops a sale and neither is unusual.

One Louisiana rule is worth knowing before you read anything about a branded title. The total-loss test is written as a percentage of retail value — 75 per cent — and it names the valuation source rather than leaving it open. Most states say “actual cash value” and let an adjuster decide what that is. Naming the handbook makes the threshold something a seller holding the same handbook can check.

Louisiana is a civil-law state and its parishes are not counties with a different name on them. Its lien and title vocabulary does not always map onto the other forty-nine, so a term you were given in another state is worth checking here rather than assuming.

The 75 per cent figure and the named handbook come from a secondary summary of Louisiana total-loss law, not from the section text; the Louisiana rule file records the salvage threshold as not yet extracted from the § itself. Information, not legal advice.

Both the plant and the port come to us. Pneumatic tankers and day cabs off the Valence Drilling Fluids work. Road tractors and flatbeds running to the service bases and the berths. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the St. Mary Parish road and levee jobs, plus the box trucks, service bodies and the pickups and work trucks the crews run.

Whichever of those you have, the offer does not change. We buy all of them.

Those are the trucks. These are the things people ask before they call.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing mirror is nothing.
• It hauled barite. Does that matter?Tell us what it carried and whether the tank or hopper has been cleaned out. It changes what we can do with it, not whether we are interested.
• It is parked at a service base I do not own. Is that a problem?No, but tell us whose gate it is and who can let us in. Shared service-base yards are the normal case along this water.
• Will you come down here for one truck?Yes. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. St. Mary Parish is a straightforward run for us.
• How far out do you come?All of St. Mary Parish and out toward Assumption Parish and Terrebonne Parish. Distance has never been the problem.

Beyond a drilling slowdown, the reasons are the ordinary ones. A service-base contract that did not renew. A partner who left and took half the work. A tanker bought when the rigs were busy and parked when they were not.

Yards along the Atchafalaya, out toward Amelia and across St. Mary Parish usually have one sitting, and so do the lots behind the Valence Drilling Fluids plant.

Most of those are not happy reasons and we do not treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That is what we are for.