The Movers’ Zone – Tip n’ Tell

Written and submitted by Timothy Brady

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension of not only sight and sound, but of moving. Making a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of furniture, odd objects, and interesting people. That’s the signpost up ahead: your next stop……The Movers’ Zone!

It was a typical mid-spring day in Tennessee. Our Van Operator was traveling down I-40 from Memphis, eastbound towards Jackson, Tennessee, to move a family from a rural home south of Jackson to their new digs, and job, in central Ohio.

As the Van Operator arrived at the home with his 70′ tractor-trailer and crew of two, he immediately saw his first challenge. The house sat approximately 100 feet off the two-lane country road with neither shoulders or a berm upon which to park the truck. Challenge number two was the bar ditch: approximately three feet deep, with a steel culvert under the gravel driveway and the driveway only 12′ wide. Plus three-feet-high stone entrance walls on either side of the driveway for 20 feet. And no plan – or estimate – for a shuttle or a long-carry.

This is a typical challenge in the day of a Van Operator, so it was time for him to pull out his bag of tricks and come up with a solution financially beneficial to the shipper, him and his crew.

The Van Operator determined he could enter the property from the road to the west, drive across a Jeep track to the gravel driveway, make a 90-degree left turn onto the gravel drive, pull to the road to straighten the trailer, then back about 15 feet and load from the garage through the back doors of the trailer.

Note this was mid-spring in Tennessee, also known as the “rainy season,” for an area that receives 65-80 inches of rain annually, much of it from March through early June. And as any Van Operator will tell you, when you enter the Moving Zone in spring in Tennessee, it’s going to rain. And rain it did.

Having the trailer doors within 20 feet of the garage was very helpful when it came to the rain, as the Van Operator and crew were able to cover most things with small tarps to keep them dry for loading. Except for when the sky opened up and dumped what seemed like 55-gallon drums of water. What normally would have been an eight-to-ten hour load time turned into a fourteen-and-a-half-hour workday, not to mention all the extra work to keep the shipper’s belongings dry from the garage to the truck.

When the Van Operator and crew were finally loaded and ready to close the doors, it was midnight. The area had received nearly four inches of rain in about nine hours, and it was still raining buckets. The ground was saturated; the clay loam was like a sticky, gooey sponge.

Now to get the tractor-trailer back onto the asphalt of a solid roadway. The Van Operator’s plan was to back onto a gravel pad next to the garage and then make the 90-degree turn to the right. Then pull forward onto the Jeep track to the road, another right, and a quick left onto the Tennessee state route he came in on. Simple.

The Van Operator backed the tractor-trailer next to the garage and started the 90-degree turn to the left. He immediately lost traction due to the gooey clay mud. It was very evident making the turn with the trailer attached was not an option. So, being adaptable, the Van Operator pulled the trailer up so the trailer kingpin was dead-center to the Jeep track. He dollied down the trailer, disconnected it and then drove the tractor down the gravel driveway, turned left onto the state highway, and turned left onto the west side of the house road. Then he backed in on the Jeep track to the trailer at a 90 degree angle. Perfect.

Note it was still raining 55-gallon drums of rain.

The plan would’ve worked if it hadn’t been raining enough to float Noah’s Ark. It would’ve worked if the Van Operator and crew weren’t dead-tired and soaked to the skin. And if the Van Operator hadn’t missed one small but important step when a trucker connects to a trailer.

One of the Van Operator’s crew was standing by the dolly crank on the left side of the trailer. His job was to raise the dolly pads once the trailer kingpin was locked into the tractor’s fifth wheel. The other crew member was to verify the kingpin lock on the fifth wheel engaged, securing the trailer to the tractor. The mistake the Van Operator made was that he didn’t get out of the tractor and verify by flashlight the kingpin had locked into the fifth wheel.

The one watching the kingpin signaled the man on the dolly pads it had locked. The dolly pads were raised, and the crew signaled the Van Operator to pull the tractor-trailer to the road. The Van Operator started to pull the tractor forward ………. suddenly he stopped, as he looked into his left mirror and saw the top left corner of the trailer raise up and tilt to the right.

Two things stopped it from going all the way over: one, the Van Operator didn’t pull the tractor all the way out from under the trailer, and two, the corner of the garage, which punched a fist-sized hole into the top right corner of the trailer. There was no possible way for the Van Operator to get back under the trailer without damaging the garage roof further. It now became a two-hour wait for a tow truck, along with two loading crew members still on the clock.

In the end the Van Operator was very fortunate.
The damage to the garage, less than $200 to repair.
The damage to the trailer to repair, again, $200.
The water damage to the HHG inside the trailer from the hole in the trailer was negligible, as the Van Operator had loaded garage and yard items into the front of the trailer, so he had the entire garage available to stage the items from the house.
The two greatest costs to the Van Operator were the $900 tow truck bill and the landscape repairs necessary because of the tow truck – about $1,200.
If a Van Operator pays attention to the details, and no matter the situation, doesn’t take shortcuts, he may just avoid tipping into a tell-tale one-way trip to … the Movers’ Zone.