Unloading

I talk about trucking on here a lot, but I've never sent many pictures of trucking to anyone, via email or this blog. So I was thinking I should do that, since it is

a: such a big part of what we do

and

b: the means by which I get many of my stories and pictures from around the country.

That said, I decided its about time y'all get to see us in action some.

So here we go.

This is us unloading our load of perlite in St Helens, OR.

First we pull into the loading/unloading area.

Then Malcolm (he does all the work here...I just drive....and do about a ton of paperwork, but at least thats clean) supervises the unloading process, which basically involves opening the hoppers one at a time and making sure the flow of product doesn't get carried away and overload the dump site. (I'm sure it has a more technical name, but who's looking at technicalities here...and in case you havn't noticed, I'm not a perfect speller and just don't feel like taking the time to "look it up" so you'll have to live with a few typo's if your going to be a frequent reader.)

Where was I? Oh yeah...

So here is the dump site which is basically a big hole in the ground. Different places have different sizes or dump holes. This one was pretty good, but because a truck had unloaded in front of us, it was already loaded with stuff so our load kind of piled up and sifted in slowly. Sometimes it just pours in and we can open our hopper full tilt which is nice because we're done fast. This time it took about an hour to unload (bet the truck behind us was frustrated).

Here is Malcolm, on the phone with his friend, Brandon, while he watches to make sure the stuff doesn't back up. He has to open and close the hopper as needed to control the flow of product.

So thats how it works....basically. I'll get shots of us loading sometime. And there is actually another way they unload us sometimes which involves rolling an auger up underneath us and augering the product into a container or just a pile on the ground. Thats neat to watch too.

PS: As a note to yesterday's post about our little leak....thought you might want to know how that turned out. As luck would have it.....they didnt' weigh us when we unloaded. So whether we lost a handfull, or a couple hundred pounds....who knows. I think it was just a little though. And the duct tape held and is still holding, despite a little rain last night. Oh the power of duct tape....