Convoy

For those of you not old enough to remember, or those of us too old to remember, the late 1970’s were a time of 55 mph speed limits and C.W. McCall’s iconic: https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=cw+mccall+convoy

Interesting things can happen to pole building kit packages once they get loaded on to one of those big rigs and headed down the highway. And I am not talking about how it is they get built on the jobsite.

I had two interesting cases from back in the 1980’s when I owned my first company providing pole building kits.

In the first one, we had loaded onto a semi with a 48 foot long flat-bed trailer all of the materials (sans the steel roofing and siding) to go from our yard in Canby, Oregon, to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. The building was to be a horse riding arena, 60 foot wide clearspan, by 120 feet long with a 16 foot eave height. Big building, big load.

The yard crew, however, was excellent at loading trucks like this. The twenty 60 foot span trusses were loaded on the bottom, with the bottom chords on the driver’s side of the trailer, leaving the peaks hanging off of the passenger side of the trailer by just under three feet. Driver had acquired all of the necessary permits and the load was entirely legal.

Late the afternoon on the same day the truck had been loaded, we received a call from the client at the building site. The building had arrived, but somehow the peaks were missing from all of the trusses!

With a little help from the troopers at the Washington State Patrol, the peaks were found smashed against a concrete overpass on Interstate 5 as it passes through Olympia. The driver, of course, swears he never noticed hitting anything!

The next story is from a few years later…same business. We were providing several buildings to be constructed at Washington State University, in Pullman, WA. From recollection the materials were shipped in early in January. For those unfamiliar with the Palouse area of Washington, when the weather turns ugly, it can really get ugly.

The truck did not arrive on the jobsite as expected, and eventually it was found upside down with pole building pieces scattered across several farm fields. It turns out the ice on the highway did not combine well with the speed of the truck – one thing led to another and the rest was history.

Justine, who arranges the shipping of most of the Hansen Pole Building kits, shared with me this morning a recent incident that occurred.

The amazing part – the first insurance adjuster to take a look at the wreckage tried to say the materials were all salvageable!