1 4. 1 ; s al : 1 LN . ; M uc.h of the construction industry takes n extended break at t le turn of the year,
Page 44
Page 46
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
nd it's not just for social reasons. "Snow and ice are not good for road surfacing,'' says Tarmac. "Cold spells we can live with, but the wind is a significant factor. It really takes the heat out of the surfacing materials and things become really difficult for us."
The inevitable knock-on effect is that things become more difficult for tipper operators. They just about survive at the best of times in a sector neither envied for its favourable haulage rates nor renowned for its regular boom times.
Large long-term building projects such as the Blue Water Shopping Mall at Dartford, Kent were forced to suspend civil works through the bad weather at the start of the year. With acres of frozen ground on building sites around the country, foundations are awkward to dig and concrete lust won't go off.
Orpington-based Thomas Clubb Haulage serves the Blue Water building complex: it is one of many tipper operators which were forced to re-schedule work but as a seasoned campaigner, it was water off a duck's back: "We expect it at this time of year anyway and so we prepare for it," says director Tom Clubb. "Last week we had a quarry cut off by snow and the A228 had become virtually impassable. We had to tell the customer we couldn't get to the quarry and so couldn't make the delivery. By that time it wasn't a problem for the customer—he couldn't use it anyway" Fortunately, much of the worst of the weather hit during the winter break, but some tipper operators have found that continuing had weather has led to a bleak start to the new year.
They deal with it in different ways: "If work is cancelled because of the bad weather, we reschedule the vehicles to help the others which are working," says Clubb. "The aim is to get the other work finished and the vehicles out of the conditions as quickly as possible." During 1996. Clubb doubts if a single full day was lost to bad weather, but in the first full week of 1997 he lost about a quarter of a day. Others have found the start a little tougher. Owner-driver Andy Cull is based near Dorchester, Dorset. Most of the time he's hauling materials from quarries owned by Camas Aggregates: "A fair amount of our work is to run sand and gravel from the Camas quarry into an RMC plant, but they couldn't send the concrete out," he says. "The market was frozen off. For four or five days work was pretty dismal and we're only working a half day here and there."
Cull adds that it been a similar story elsewhere in the county. Once the snow falls, getting vehicles to the quarry face can be a bit of an academic exercise: if the concrete manufacturers can't find a market, they don't want the raw materials either. "It's a cashflow thing," he says.
David Weeks, a spokesman for ARC Southern, explains: "With the stone it's not so bad; you simply leave it in the ground. But the bitumen and sand comes in from outside and we don't want enormous stocks of it building up when there's no-one to sell the blacktop on to." He agrees that things have been difficult for transport suppliers: "We have had to say to franchised and contracted owner-drivers that we just haven't got the work to keep them going. Things are had enough in the quarrying industry as it is, with massive declines in quarried products. In recent years we have really cut down on the number of hauliers we use. We had been able to keep giving work to our franchised operators, but even they have been suffering recently."
"We were struggling to find work with the ground being frozen—there was no road workings or concreting taking place." Tim Grattan TW & EJ Grattan
Arthur Shirley runs Shirley's Transport, near Stoke-on-Trent. It is principally a tanker operator, but the corn pany also has a tipping division. Despite its self-imposed fortnight break, which is designed to offset the seasonal lull, the weather has had a significant effect "We normally have three vehicles and subcontract up to five other loads a day," says Shirley. "Today, 16 January, is the first day this year we've had our third vehicle working and been able to subcontract any work. We carry some raw materials into a concrete manufacturer, which hasn't been able to get the concrete out, so they don't want what we would normally deliver."
Up in Derbyshire's High Peak, near Buxton, TW&EJ Gratton has experienced some lows, but has come out on top for the time of year. "We were basically frozen off last week and we were struggling to find work with the ground being frozen there was no road workings or concreting taking place," says Tim Grafton.
However, by being able to spread his options and adding short-term commodities like rocksalt to the company's delivery sched
ule, he has been able to compensate for the shortfall of regular work. We transferred some lime to a steelworks in South Wales over the New Year," he says. "Consequently we've had a better start to January than we did last year."
As well affecting operators' ability to collect, the weather also has a physical effect on the load itself.
Simon Mugglestone is transport manager at Halcion Haulage, a neighbour of Shirley's Transport. It runs six 38-tonne tippers out of Chesterton. "With sand, for example, if its been on over the weekend you haven't got a load of sand anymore by the time you get to your delivery point—you've got a brick,he says. In those conditions we have to make damn sure we have the vehicles inside somewhere where they can keep a bit warmer."
That's not easy if an operator doesn't have it's own garaging. Operators like Biddulph-based Eric Armitt don't have freezing loads to vorrv about because they deliver rocksalt to council depots, but Sandy Vickers on the company's traffic desk says Armitt sometimes has physical difficulties getting up farm lanes to collect agricultural produce. Fortunately the work is flexible enough for alternative work to be found.
Of all the problems facing tippermen in wintry conditions, the most ironic comes from Yorkshire Jperator Jonas Crowther. Among many other commodities, it distributes coal to local merchants, and Nicholas Jonas remarks: -The cold weather has produced quite a run on domestic coal consumption, but we just can't get enough of it to keep the coal merchants' yards topped up."
Who would have thought, 10 years ago, that there could ever be a shortage of coal in Yorkshire?