The superhero of the Utilities Department in the city of Palm Bay, Fla., is a real beast. It weighs in at 64,000 pounds and snacks on sand and other sewer-line debris. But this brute, a Vac-Con combination sewer-cleaning truck with an 11-cubic-yard debris tank, is also a babied beauty that enjoys frequent spit-shine polish jobs from workers.
“Our workers love this truck,” says Dave Bryant, supervisor of wastewater collection for Palm Bay, a city of about 100,000 in central Florida. “It’s two years old and it looks like it’s brand new. You can’t tell that it’s used for sewer work.
“The guys carry around cleaning supplies and polish it up in their spare time. Sometimes they take their lunches short to do it. They also keep a little can of white paint and some artist brushes handy and touch up the rims, just to keep it looking perfect.”
All the trimmings
The city bought the truck to reduce the cost of hiring contractors to clean its 250 miles of mainline sewers. The city maxed out much of the optional equipment on the truck, which is built on an International 7400 chassis. It has a 300-hp diesel engine instead of the standard 250 hp; a 1,300-gallon freshwater tank instead of a 1,000-gallon tank; and the longest available telescoping boom, which can reach out 30 feet from the side of the truck (at a right angle) and 10 feet out in front.
“It’s as hopped-up and souped-up as it can be,” says Bryant. “Our goal was to buy a piece of equipment that could do everything we wanted without using contract labor, as well as last a long time.”
The long telescoping boom makes it easier to clean out the city’s 100 lift stations and 2,000 manholes, many of which are in remote areas. “We have a lot of manholes that are off the beaten path,” Bryant says. “Trucks this size don’t fare well off-road, so we got the boom extension. We opted for a larger water tank so we’d have more on-board water. That way, we spend more time cleaning and less time refilling.”
Fewer trips
The truck provides power and flexibility. The water pump generates up to 80 gpm/3,000 psi. A Roots 824 positive displacement blower (16 inches Hg at 3,600 cfm) from Dresser Inc. can remove debris, such as sand, that’s underwater. At the same time, a 450-gpm rear-mounted GP805 pump (Giant Industries Inc.) pumps water out of the debris tank.
“This maximizes productivity,” Bryant notes. “When we leave a job, the debris tank is full of sand, not water. So it requires fewer trips to complete a job. And without the additional weight of water in the tank, we get better mileage, too. This truck has completely changed the way we do business.”
City residents love the truck, too. “Even though it’s this big truck, it still looks pretty cool,” Bryant says. “People come up to us all the time and say, ‘Man, that’s a really cool truck. What the hell does it do?’” It makes like a superhero and saves the day – and money, too. n
Correction
Because of incorrect information supplied to Cleaner, a manufacturer was misidentified in the April Money Machines column about Flat Rate Plumbing. The exterior picture of the truck and the interior picture of the custom storage system showed the Hackney P/2000 supertruck. The article gave a different manufacturers’s name.
