By George L. Nitti
Have you ever had the fear of losing your brakes driving down a steep decline, carrying a heavy load?
Bite your nails and pray for an off-ramp!
Well, according to Greg Coakley, scene supervisor and recovery operator of T&M Towing & Hazmat Inc. of Eugene, Oregon, “When you are a driving a semi tractor-trailer coming down a windy 8-mile hill with a six and half percent grade just a little too fast, your brakes will heat up until you have no stopping power.”
Yikes!
On May 2, Coakley and crew were summoned to an accident scene off of Highway 58 involving not one but two semis that lost their brakes at the same time. It just so happened that they were driven by a father and son who were carrying 96,0000 pounds of potatoes. They found an escape ramp where they slowed down, crashed, and entangled in 3 feet of pea gravel.
To the rescue, the T & M recovery team trekked an hour and a half with their 2017 International 50-ton Powerbilt, a 1994 Kenworth Century 50 ton, a 2010 International Tractor and a Ford 650 Flatbed.
Coakley informed that runaway ramps are a protective measure when semis lose their brakes as the pea gravel inevitably slows them down and stops them.
The challenging part of the recovery was two-fold: Disentangling the trucks on a narrow roadway and then pulling those trucks through the pea gravel onto the highway.
“First we waited 7 hours for hazmat to arrive because one of the tractor’s fuel tanks was broken open,” said Coakley.
When it was time to get down to the business of disentangling the semis, T & M maneuvered their two 50-ton wreckers up the side road of the escape ramp and positioned them on the front and back sides of the entangled semis.
“The first semi had bad axles and the other one was entwined in those axles,” Coakley informed. “We hooked the winches to them and started gently pulling them a part. It took four hours.”
Once separated, the team winched the semis down the escape ramp, about 300 feet, which took an additional four hours.
Their Ford F650 was used to transport the parts and debris from the semis while their International Tractor, driven by T & M’s owner Tim Baumgartner, hauled one of the trailers that had broken off from the disabled tractor.
Fortunately, the potatoes that they were hauling did not need to be off-loaded, but the recovery itself spanned a total of 23 hours, which is no small potatoes.
By George L. Nitti
“A mixer recovery can turn you from a hero to a zero in two seconds flat.”
Referring to a local tow saying, owner Mike Phillips of All-American Towing & Recovery, with locations in Denton, Justin and Rhone, Texas, understands what can go wrong with mixer recoveries, averaging 12 to 15 a month. He said, “If you don’t give the mixer the respect it deserves, it will absolutely not go your way.”
On April 1, 2022, All-American Towing & Recovery was dispatched to yet another concrete mixer casualty, this time about 5 miles from one of their Texas locations.
“Mixer recoveries are common around here,” said Phillips, owner of All-American, noting that there are probably over 300 mixer companies in the fast-growing Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. “They fall over quite a bit because they have a high center of gravity.”
Phillips indicated that it doesn’t take much for a driver to come around a turn too fast or slip their tire off the edge of the road, causing an awkwardly shaped 65,000-ton mixer to rock and tip over.
Fortunately, Phillips and his crew are well versed in the mixer recovery routine, understanding the ins and outs, some presenting more challenges than others. Phillips said, “A mixer is one of those things that intimidates a lot of guys, especially guys that don’t work on them on the scale that we do.”
Within minutes, All-American had their 2011 Kenworth 1075 Century Rotator dispatched, along with their 2015 Mack 5130 Century, with Phillips taking the lead that included operators Kris Moore, Tyler Parker and Jason Watts.
“We don’t even need to talk when we get on scene,” said Phillips. “Everybody knows what their job is, everybody knows what we are going to use to upright it. We do so many of them, it just kind of floats. It’s like muscle memory.”
The first measure was to assess and remove the drive line and set the brakes in order to prevent a rollaway situation. “If you start up righting one and it is on an incline, the tires roll and it takes off, there goes your tow truck with it,” said Phillips.
Next the operators hooked the lift and catch bridle, simultaneously. Phillips emphasized, “You have to set them up slow and steady. It pays to allow the mud in the drum to find center because the drum will roll. It will pivot on its axis until the mud is on the bottom. And if you set it up too fast the drum will spin quickly, and the momentum will carry it in the opposite direction.”
Particularly challenging was that the mixer laid perpendicular to the roadway with its nose against some trees. “Generally, we like to back up to the center of the drum and do a reverse roll,” said Phillips. “Or have a truck in the general area and pick it up and push it away from us.”
In this case, the mixer was in a bad spot, sitting in a fairly steep ditch that made it impossible to get a truck down to it. So, their next option was to upright it off the rear pedestal.
Phillips said, “That poses its own set of challenges. You must have a lot of trust in the drive motor in the front of the mixer drum to be able to accept and hold that weight. If we sensed that the motor had any kind of distortion to it or broken bolts, we would have had to do something different to it,” he said.
While their 5130 25-ton applied downward pressure to the axles, the rotator up righted the mixer. Once upright, their 2018 Peterbilt Century 9055, which arrived later on scene, had its cables hooked to the nose, pulling the front of the mixer onto the road as Phillips, using a remote, swung the boom and set the back of the mixer onto the roadway where it was finally towed to the customer’s yard.
Phillips said, “One thing I really push to my operators is that just because we have it upright, that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows from there. Generally, when that mixer is turned over, it’s sustained damage that’s going to make its towability less than ideal. So we preach to our guys to inspect it very well, to maintain your speeds and watch your turns.”
Editor's Note: This story appeared in American Towman Magazine's July, 2022 Edition. Photo credits go to Brad Fenley Images.
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By George L. Nitti
On the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, Raygor’s Auto Inc of Scottsdale, Pa., was dispatched by the PA State Police to respond to a tractor trailer on I-70 that went off the roadway while dislodging 15,000 pounds of hot dog meat onto the highway.
Lead operator Alex Raygor said, “The trailer came disconnected from the truck and all of the unloaded meat came out of the front of the trailer.”
Raygor called in a couple of his heavy-duty wreckers – a 99’ Kenworth W900 with a 25-ton Aatac and a 78’ Kenworth W900 with a 30-ton Weldbuilt - along with a Bobcat T650 skid steer, two dump trucks, a dump trailer, a Bobcat 430 mini excavator, a 2008 Ford F650 rollback and a 96' International aatac 12 ton wrecker. Other crew included John Stillwagon, Josh Strohm and Todd Raygor
One of the first orders of business was to deal with the messy, slimy meat spill on the highway. Raygor said, “A skidloader, which had a bucket on it, was used to clean-up the soupy meat paste and put it into the dump trucks.”
Then the crew turned its attention to the tractor, which was about 150 feet off the highway in the woods. Trees were through the windshield and cab; the hood, front axles and fuel tanks were ripped out; the front drive was pulled loose, and the king pin plate was ripped off the trailer. The tractor was leaking fuel.
After cleaning up the leak, the crew cleared up the tree limbs and parts from the tractor with a chain saw and moved them out of the way with an excavator. Then the two heavy duty wreckers worked on recovering the tractor.
“Our cleanup crew then finished loading the cargo for transport,” said Raygor, “and swept up all oil dry from the roadway.”
Once back at the facility, the crew washed all equipment including chains, straps, trucks and equipment to remove the liquid meat.
Raygor said, “My truck still stinks. Dogs were eating meat out of the fender wells of my pickup. Maggots were everywhere. Our place smelled like death for weeks."
