My Job

And mine had been pretty good all morning. Then, around noon, the boss tells me to head over to this church to pick up one of our backhoes. So I get over there, load it up, and chain it down without any problems. Now I'm thinking about how all I gotta do is get this to the next jobsite (about 20 miles away), unload it and then head back to clock out. That would have put me home by 3pm at the latest. Not bad for a Friday.

While I'm thinking about this, and getting something to eat and drink, I'm slowly pulling out of the parking lot. I stop, check traffic, and proceed. Suddenly something is pulling back against me. I quickly check my mirrors and see the backhoe leaning hard to the right, then there's a pop and a flash and the power lines come crashing down to the ground.

First thing I do is get on the radio and notify anyone who would answer what just happened. Then I get out of the truck to flag traffic. I later realized that getting out of the truck probably wasn't a very wise idea considering the power line was still hanging on the backhoe. Fortunately, it turned out to be a cable line that hit. However, since power was knocked out in the neighborhood as well the electric company sends a truck out. They arrived about 5 minutes after my foreman had got there. My foreman was thinking that I might have loaded the backhoe wrong and had the arm too high. I told him that I'd always loaded it that way and hadn't ever knocked anything more than an occasional tree limb down.

When the electric company's repair man showed up, he takes a quick assessment of the situation and notices that the line that I hit was actually higher than another line that's still where it's supposed to be in the air and attached to the pole. So it's now evident that the cable line was drooping below the 15' mark that they're supposed to be at a minimum. With that bit of information, both my company and myself are relieved of any liability. However, had I been paying full attention to my surroundings I would have spotted the sagging cable line and avoided the whole incident. Not to mention the fact that I could have been home popping the top on a cold beer around 3pm instead of almost 6.

Here's the best pic I snapped of the incident:

 

The owners of my company, like many small business owners, are very frugal. They like to find all sorts of ways to cut costs where ever possible. We work with a minimal crew, operate older equipment, and have our own maintenance men that are apt in all our equipment. Not only our vehicles, but our concrete and asphalt plants as well.

So it was no surprise to me that when one of our concrete trucks, a '95 model, was in need of some extensive repairs, the owners opted to repair and replace whatever necessary as opposed to buying a replacement truck. The cost of a "newsed" concrete truck runs right around $60k. That money would probably only get you a late 90s or early 00s model. A brand new truck runs right around $150-200k.

There were two major problems with this '95 truck. The rear suspension was completely worn out. All stabilizers, springs, bushings and bearings had worn out so badly that it was all I could to to keep this truck on the road above 45 mph. And the other major issue was the drum. It would leak with any load on it near the man hole. It had also be chiseled so much that the outer shell was nearly paper thin. So a new drum was ordered and arrived this past Thursday. The one question I had, which was quickly answered, was what were we going to do with the old drum. Sell it as scrap metal, of course. So I drove the truck over to the local scrap yard and helped our mechanic get the drum ready to be removed from the truck. Here's some pictures I snapped of the truck and crane that removed the drum.















I gotta tell y'all, I really got some strange looks when I drove this shell of a concrete truck back to the shop so the new drum could be put on.

 

No, that's a guy who works at the scrap yard. That's actually a hard hat made to look like a cowboy hat. Our head mechanic, Randy, is at the back of the drum.

 

No, not on that truck or the other one just like it. We also have two '98s that we bought from IMI that have tick marks on them.