Tracked grinders help site-clearing company in I-75 widening project.
Competition for existing roadwork projects has been spirited to say the least, due mostly to the uncertain, often-disappointing availability of highway funds. To remain at the top of bid lists and be better positioned than competitors, companies must leverage all of their strengths.
In an ongoing project to widen a 26-mile section of I-75 north of Tampa, Fla., two of Consolidated Resource Recovery’s (CRR) strengths for grinding cleared trees and other wood debris are its tracked 6600 Wood Hogs. Using the two horizontal grinders, the company grinded adjacent to active traffic, coped with extremely wet terrain and eliminated the downtime lost in repositioning equipment.
Open wide
The widening of I-75 from the Florida-Georgia line southward to Naples, Fla., has been an ongoing Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) project for more than five years. CRR’s part of the project will help to ease traffic congestion as traffic nears Tampa, according to Glenn Purvis, CRR’s operations manager.
“This section of the widening is about 26 miles long, starting at State Highway 50 in the north and extending to SH-54 to the south,” Purvis says. “We are working as grinding subcontractors to the clearing contractor, which is handling the cutting and clearing part of the project. Basically, we follow behind them as they clear, processing the debris they pile for us.”
And pile debris they do. A trip up and down that section of I-75 finds hundreds of piles dotting the roadside – either debris awaiting CRR’s grinders, or mulch CRR already ground. Purvis says the project, which started in mid-May, has a number of elements to it that, for many firms, could have been problematic.
“The most important facet of this job is the proximity to an active traffic flow,” he says. “Unlike some jobs in which material is hauled to a laydown area to be processed away from traffic, we are literally working roadside.
“In addition, due to the fact that it has been a particularly wet spring and summer, many of the areas in which we were working were little more than a swamp at times,” Purvis adds. “It’s a departure from what might be considered by many to be ‘normal’ grinding, but we are well-equipped to handle jobs like this.”
Horizontal advantage
CRR’s answer to both the proximity issue and the ability to work in wet conditions was the 6600 Wood Hogs from Morbark. The grinders were purchased through the Tampa branch of Nortrax Equipment.
By design, the 6600 is less prone to flying debris – a prerequisite for the state-run job, Purvis says.
“FDOT is very focused on safety on all of its projects and, as a result, is specific about the type of grinding equipment that can be used in different situations,” he says. “While a tub grinder is a very productive piece of equipment, the risk of debris leaving the tub is always high, meaning the unit would have to be situated far away from the active jobsite.
“With the horizontal grinder we can be right there working the piles where they sit.”
To further complicate matters, the early part of 2014 was unusually wet in Florida. The trend continued into summer, resulting in brutal working conditions.
But, the 6600’s tracked mobility allowed CRR to cope with the muddy terrain.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that having a track machine provides benefits far beyond an ability to move through rough or wet terrain,” Purvis says. “Because it is on tracks, we are able to simplify the process of going from pile to pile. Without it, every time we’d need to move we’d have to stop, clean up in front of the machine, back a loader up to it and drag it to the new location. That is easily a 15-minute process. Because we sometimes move as many as 10 times a day, that could be a couple hours of wasted production.
“So on a job like this with hundreds of individual piles, we feel we’ve really capitalized on that advantage,” he adds.
Piles of value
In the distant past, all of the material cleared and piled simply would have been landfilled or hauled away to be burned in nearby fields. However, better environmental awareness has eliminated those steps, according to Chris Snow, CRR’s vice president of corporate affairs.
“The I-75 job represents a good deal of byproduct from the clearing effort,” Snow says. “We’ve been in the grinding business for a quarter century now and, in that time, have established some solid markets for mulch. So everything we’ve ground has a home.”
The ground products are used in a couple of different ways – as soil additives and supplements, and as mulch. Although production rates throughout the job varied due to the differences in tree and brush density from area to area, Snow says CRR was pleased with the throughputs it achieved with the two 6600s.
“The track 6600s have been our horizontal of choice for some time now,” he says. “We have been regularly updating models as they’ve become available, and the current two have been in our fleet since March and April of this year.
“In this business,” Snow continues, “that type of grinder is simply the benchmark. We couldn’t tackle the projects we do without them, and the I-75 job is proof of that. We were being asked to work in some very challenging conditions, yet we were able to get the job done safely, efficiently and on time.”
Snow adds that while the equipment plays a huge role in CRR’s grinding efforts, the support the company has received related to the equipment cannot be overstated.
“We’re fortunate to have the support of some of the best organizations in the business, including Morbark and Nortrax,” Snow says. “They’ve both been extremely responsive to our needs and have played key roles for us as we’ve grown over the years.”
According to CRR, its portion of the I-75 widening wrapped up in mid-September. The full project is expected to be complete in the spring of 2016.
Larry Trojak of Trojak Communications is a freelance marketing communications professional based in Ham Lake, Minn.