Delivering a WindMill Section
The date was Two Thousand and Seven, in January, in Fargo North Dakota.
It was COLD. The outside temperature was minus forty degrees at night and didn't warm up much during the day time. My job was to load and secure a windmill tower section and take it to Idaho. When working outside in that kind of cold I don't stay outside very long. I work for a few minutes and then get back in the truck to warm up. In that kind of weather the truck remains at constant idle, sometimes for weeks. It's NEVER turned off except to check the oil. It's fueled while still running. If it were turned off too long it might never start again. Things are tough when it's that cold.
Well I got er loaded. The picture above was taken later in the trip, in South Dakota (I'll get to that). In Fargo while loading, instead of the trailer being a 3 + 1 as shown it was a quad. Four axles in a row. Oh by the way, that's an extendable trailer. We call them 'stretch double drops." From the front bumper of the truck to the end of the tower was over a hundred feet. (Perhaps a hundred and twenty .....)
I had permits for the route from Fargo to Idaho, one for each state that we would pass through. I was ready to go. But there were routing problems. The city of Fargo didn't want us to go on certain streets. The city mothers made life difficult for us. Consequently I couldn't get to a truck scale that was capable of weighing it. I couldn't get any axel weights.
So I left anyway.
At the crack of dawn on a COLD winter day I left town and headed to Idaho. For reasons unknown I was routed south and NOT on the freeway. I got to see a lot of backroad N.Dakota that trip. I got to see a LOT of back roads period. Two escorts (pilot cars) went with me. One in front and one in the rear. We headed south, into South Dakota. When we got FAR enough south we headed southwest on the diagonal and trended more west than south. I don't recall the names or numbers of all of the little roads we went on but there were a BUNCH of them. Thank god for GPS. The load was too tall to fit under many of the highway overpasses on the interstate. They routed us around them.
Finding a place to park at night was hard. A lot of times I'd just pull over, set out 'blinky lights' and spend the night at a wide spot in the road. The west is agricultural so wide spots are fairly common. The problem was seeing one soon enough to get stopped in time. That thing doesn't stop quickly or back up very easy.
As luck would have it we come upon a truck stop where we could get an accurate weight. Lucky for me the scale master knew how to handle an oversized load. When I looked at the axle weight numbers I was unhappy. Bad news. I was under gross but too heavy on the trailer (for a quad) in Wyoming. (Every state has different laws) The scale master told me that I had to move. RIGHT NOW...a storm was moving in. If I stayed where I was I'd cause a super large snowdrift. They didn't want a snowdrift forming there (People in South Dakota know about that kind of thing. I was clueless). So I moved. There was another truck stop down the road a few miles that didn't have that problem. Dunno why.
They allowed me to park the trailer....and leave it for a while.
To make a looooong sad story not so long. The escorts stayed with the load (in a nice warm motel) and I went back to Georgia to pick up a spreader bar. (that thing between the three axles shown on the trailer and that last axle all alone at the rear)
I got to the Yard in Georgia on a weekend. No one was there. How I managed to find the spreader bar and load it (it weighs a LOT) on the rear of my tractor is a story all it's own. Maybe some other time I'll tell it.
I returned to South Dakota, rented a forklift, unloaded the spreader bar and removed the 'flip axle' from the rear of the Quad (under the load) and discovered that ...we had another problem. The spreader bar didn't fit.
I almost cried.
Never give up. I hired a welder, a machinist and got a VERY big hammer....and went to work. In a couple of days we MADE it fit. Then off to Wyoming.
We made it past the scales just fine. It would have been heavy for a quad (by a couple of thousand pounds) but it was legal (barely) for a 3+ 1 ( There was even a couple of hundred pounds to spare.)
Then on to Idaho. (More blizzards and stormy weather on the way)
When I finally got to Idaho I found that the wind farm was (where else) at the top of a mesa. The roads going up to it were covered in ice. (nother story here)
We made it. The guys at the windfarm were aghast. "You have the wrong kind of trailer for that load. It should be a WHOLE lot bigger."
Yeah no kidding.
But I got er done.
