Equipping road warriors
Project: Highway equipment replacement
Jurisdiction: Martin County, Minn.
Agency: Highway Department
Vendors: Caterpillar
Date: Fall 2006
Cost: $45,000
Martin County, Minn., Highway Department crews often can be seen along local gravel roads clearing ditches and reshaping corners. “We have a lot of erosion that has developed over the years,” says Greg Rabbe, road foreman. “Ditches have silted in, and a lot of culverts through driveways are plugged or half-plugged.”
The highway department maintains 510 miles of roads, nearly half of which are gravel. Besides residential traffic, the roads carry a great deal of truck traffic from a local soybean processing plant, hog producers and two ethanol plants under construction. When heavy equipment turns corners on gravel roadways, it often pushes aggregate into the ditches.
For years, crews used a rubber-wheeled skid steer loader to clear the debris and restore the roads, but the equipment was aging and requiring frequent maintenance. In fall 2006, the highway department bought a track-driven, multi-terrain loader manufactured by Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar to replace the skid steer.
Crews use the new loader to reshape road corners and doze material from ditches onto the driving surface. When reshaping ditches, the highway department uses a motor grader in open areas, while the multi-terrain loader works around power poles and other difficult-to-reach areas. The loader’s tracks help crews work in locations and conditions inaccessible to other types of equipment. “With the ditch clearing, it’s not a large area you’re working in. It’s a lot of tight corners and [turns],” says Jason Steuber, an equipment operator with Martin County. “With the tracks, we’re able to float over the softer, wet ground.”
The highway department has found more uses for the loader than crews expected, logging more than 350 hours during its first year on the job. For example, crews clear branches with it when trimming trees before heavy snow falls. “We’ve got a couple of guys running chain saws, and we drop the limbs in the ditch. The [loader] pushes the branches into a pile, and we load them into a truck,” Rabbe says. “That has cut down on man hours.”