Larry Ford

I would like to take a minute and tell a story of how well teamwork can make a job much easier.

This early in the year, a 1000 cy day can really be tough to pull off from a RM supplier's standpoint. Needless to say, on the 3rd of April, that day came.

The first call went to Elmer to get some tankers to help Leo out because we were also using slag. That makes it difficult because we have just enough slag storage for a full load at one time and a load of slag with this mix design will go about 300 cy's.

Fly ash is also used along with cement, so we had 3 tankers coming and going thru the course of the whole day hauling dry powder. The pour with the slag was going about 110 cy yards/hr with a total of 800 cy in Story City. Because of the distance, we needed some extra help with mixers.

Duane Hassebrock found several dump truck drivers that can drive RM trucks and we filled all of our vacant trucks first. The remaining drivers he found were to help with material (limestone & sand) so we wouldn't run out of these key ingredients. Brian Frame and I began calling around to find some more mixers because with our regular business and the distance for the big pour we needed about 19 trucks. Chaz in Waterloo came up with 4 for us and Al in Newton gave us one of his 3 trucks for the day. Then I spoke with Rod in Des Moines and he was able to give me 2 more trucks. All in all, we now had our 19 trucks.

The day began at 5:45 and we had trucks on sight and dumping by approximately 6:30. Brian or I never got up or ran out of trucks until around 11:30.

The trucks were cycling nicely and everything appeared to be running smoothly. As we were loading trucks, we noticed we were having a belt problem on the plant, so Brian Peterson came up and on the fly and helped correct our problem without missing a beat on loading trucks.

Our contractor, in the middle of the pour, then asked if we could take some cylinders for them as a measure for later pours. We agreed and put Cindy Dela Rosa on this task.

Matt Triggs (our new PC foreman) then came in to the plant and offered his 2 guys for dump trucks to haul material. This is where more teamwork came into play because he drove thru the yard and noticed how far down our piles were. The stock piles were far enough down Steve Sansgaard (loader operator) was scraping next to our retaining wall for all the material to go in my bins. Without his help we might have run out of material because things were moving faster than anticipated.

Now we had 5 dump trucks hauling constantly to the plant and were able to hold our own until the big pour was done.

I almost forgot about the best part of this team work. Nate Hopwood (from the Brooklyn IT

Department) was working on the server and "froze" it in the middle of the day. Some of you may not be aware, but our dispatch system works off this server! It did not take long and that was fixed. It just made it interesting for 5 minutes or so. Since then, I have thanked Nate several times and told him I loved him.

As you can see, many things had to be coordinated and recoordinated to make this day a success and I'm glad to be on the side I'm on!

Thanks to everyone for their help and have a safe year!