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Mowing more than weekend job for county crews
Published July 27, 2010
Mowing the grass is that job we all love to hate, and we’ve all been doing a lot of it this year, too.
But probably nobody in Guadalupe County has a mowing job like Larry Timmermann’s Road and Bridge Department does.
Every day, five days a week, Timmermann has 10 tractors out with bat-wing shredders, cutting the grass along some 670 linear miles of roads — and they have to cut both sides of the road. They try to hit each right-of-way four times a summer.
It’s a very costly operation. Each tractor and shredder costs around $35,000, and the county’s crews wear them flat out — some being more than 20 years old.
“We buy good equipment and use it way past its depreciation. We have 14 tractors, and at any given time, three or four of them are being worked on,” Timmermann said. “Cutting the grass is one of our most expensive maintenance items. It’s also one of the things we get the most calls about.”
This year, the job has been made more difficult because the regular rains have caused it to grow very high and very thick.
The June 8 flash flood didn’t help, either, because Timmermann had to put all of his employees on picking up flood debris and reopening roads and neighborhoods.
“Last year, we didn’t have to mow very much,” Timmermann said. “This year, we’re constantly behind because of the rain and because of the flood. It’s like your lawn. You let it go two weeks and it starts to look like a jungle.”
And that’s about how the side of Hoffman Road off U.S. 90A out where Juan Hernandez was mowing Monday afternoon.
The grass, helped by the rain and neglected a little because of the flood recovery, was taller than the Ford tractor Hernandez drives.
“Unless I’m needed somewhere else, I’m mowing every day, every summer,” Hernandez said.
Anyone who’s mowed the lawn knows there’s a lot of daydreaming involved — particularly for those who have riders and who mow the same section of grass each weekend, all summer long. Hernandez probably does when he’s mowing at home, with his much-smaller Murray Ultra or Yard Machine rider mowers.
But he doesn’t have that luxury on the job. Hernandez has to watch for other vehicles on the road, he has to watch the fence line, and he has to look for phone service pedestals, as well as trash and debris hidden in the deep grass, waiting to tear up his mower or one of its shredder wings.
“I have to think about how close I am to the fence, and I have to watch for tires or junk along the road. You have to be pretty careful,” he said.
Mowing isn’t for everybody, he acknowledged.
“But I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve been on a tractor since I was a kid. You just get on it and start going.”
Donald Jones doesn’t mow the grass at home. His wife, Pauline, does, and after a week of mowing on the time clock, Jones said he really appreciates not having to do it at home, too.
“She gets bored in the house, and she says this keeps her from being bored,” Jones said.
The home lawn mower is a little less elaborate than the one Jones uses at work.
“It’s a self-propelled push mower,” he said. “It’s got a power pack, so it’s not as bad as a regular push mower.”
On the job, Jones has been mowing in the county’s Area E — from FM 123 to FM 775 down to the Wilson and Bexar County lines, more than 11 years. He knows every inch of the roadways — on both sides.
“It’s pretty good-sized, and I guess I’m the designated mower operator in our area,” he said.
Jones is out every day on the county’s oldest tractor unless it’s raining real bad or there’s lightning in the area. A little dampness makes the grass easier to cut, but too much can make it ball up and clog the shredder wings. If it’s so wet that the tractor will put ruts in the ground, the mowing stops and the crews move on to other work.
“If we’ve got new blades on the mower deck, it doesn’t ball up real bad,” Jones said. “But when the blades get dull or nicked up from debris that falls off vehicles or people throw trash out and we don’t see it, we can get pretty good gashes on the blades and even break them off, and it can get expensive.”
If a mower operator sees something in the grass — and a good one is constantly watching because torn-up equipment costs in both time and money — he stops the mower, gets down off the tractor and either pulls the debris to the road or pushes it back to the fence line.
“We let the supervisor know, and the man who picks up trash comes down to get it,” Jones said.
The most important — and sometimes the most difficult — part of the job is keeping the equipment going, Jones said.
Each day, he checks the fluid levels and looks at the fasteners and hydraulic hoses. Every second or third day, he has to grease all its fittings. Each winter, each mower and shredder goes into the road department’s central shop, where it is gone through and renewed or overhauled as necessary.
“The toughest part is making sure the mower is in top shape,” Jones explained. “If it isn’t, I have to let my lead man or supervisor know.”
Out on the road, the work is hot and dirty, Jones said.
It can also be dangerous.
“When we’re out mowing and we have our signs up, keep watch for us and be ready to slow down,” he said. “Sometimes, we’ll have to move out into the road because a lot of our roads have signs we have to mow around. We mow up to them, go around them and then back up to them.”
And another big help would be not to dump junk along the right-of-way.
“The grass can get up higher than the mower itself, and we try to keep an eye out, but you can’t see anything under it,” he said.
In the heat, with the sun beating down, it’s important to stay hydrated, and Jones carries a water cooler and his lunch with him, just like the rest of the county’s road department workers. They stop and eat — and hope for a little shade — wherever they happen to be at lunch time, to save time.
“All the employees on tractors carry their lunch,” Jones said. “A lot of times, I think about having an air-conditioned cab, but I know I ain’t ever going to get that. I’ve bought a fan I’m fixing to put on it where I’ll have my own ventilation. I just have to get the wires strung to the power box that’s on it, and it’ll be nice when I get it on it.”
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