I was watching Kitchen Crashers and their semi truck delivery of trax decking boards got stuck a couple streets away. It couldn’t make the turn. They had to forklift the 20 ft long decking over to the house.
I’ve had construction materials delivered and it always came in a delivery truck. Not a semi with trailer.
Isn’t a struck truck the retailer or shippers problem? You or your contractor isn’t responsible for schlepping all that material from a stuck truck is he? If it’s shipped direct from the manufacturer then isn’t it the shippers problem? Common sense says huge semis don’t deliver to residential homes. They need to arrange a local residential delivery truck don’t they?
How common a problem is this? Are semis routinely trying to deliver to homes these days?
One time I had a load of lumber rejected. It arrived banded on a pallet. I asked the driver if he had a forklift or something to unload it. Nope. So I refused the delivery. I was prepared to unload a stack of lumber piece by piece. But it was banded and I didn’t have anything to cut the steel bands.
I’ve had a number of things delivered by full-size semis. The problem has not been maneuvering the rig through my neighborhoods (although I’ve been lucky to live in areas with wide streets and gentle turns), but unloading them without a forklift or loading dock. Most big trucks don’t have dropgates.
More than one load had to be unloaded in pieces, breaking the pallets on the truck and handing down the chunks of machinery or cases of books or whatever.
I had some very large, heavy machinery delivered a couple of years ago, and having the load transferred from a long-route semi to a smaller truck with a boom crane at a loading yard cost more than either shipping leg.
A friend of mine works at a long-haul trucking company; she has told me about the occasional order that they’ve gotten to deliver something at a residence, for which they (the trucking company) aren’'t well-equipped. They have full-length trailers, they don’t have drop-gates or lifts (as Amateur Barbarian notes in his experience), and they don’t usually provide service beyond dropping off the item (i.e., they don’t bring it into your house).
Nonetheless, they will occasionally get orders to deliver to houses. It’s nearly always a case of an individual ordering something that isn’t usually delivered to a house (such as commercial-grade kitchen equipment) from a manufacturer or seller who doesn’t usually ship to residences…and neither the buyer nor the shipper taking the time to investigate the shipping arrangements in detail during the sales process.
Although sometimes you can amuse the neighbors. When we moved, I had two cars shipped in an enclosed trailer, one of the tandem articulated ones where the vehicles in the front second are accessed by jacknifing the rear section out of the way. I wasn’t here when the cars were delivered, but my house agent told me they rumbled up about 7:00 pm. Now, usually they will re-stack the cars for efficient access at each next stop, but they apparently made an unexpected side run to deliver my cars before the others. So they had to unload almost all the cars in both trailers to get to mine and then re-load the others for their next stops.
I guess by the time the Porsche RSR, the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the '64 XKE and a Ferrari (California, my guy thought, but not sure) were unloaded and lined up, the 100 neighbors were sure Bill Gates was moving in. Then they unloaded my two cars, one of which had to be hand-pushed into the garage, and loaded up all the pretties and drove away to mass disappointment.
Around here most places deliver building materials on semis with a lifting arms attached, like this (Welcome To The New Beacon Website). Sometimes they are shorter than semis but often are full length.
You did not have a claw hammer?? The bands snap easily when twisted in the claws of a claw hammer. I have used Vice-grips for this once, not pretty, but it worked. Slip-jaw pliers also work, as do tin snips. I can not imagine rejecting a load I was prepared to unload by hand because I could not figure out a way to remove the bands from it. I truly mean no offense it just blows my mind is all.
On the show of course they needed the material delivered RIGHT NOW!! Or did they? Where did the forklift come from? It IS a “Reality Show” after all. I have seen a semi unloaded by hand in a similar situation. 50 workers can unload almost anything very quickly. Just do not let OSHA see it done.
Seeing a semi making this kind of delivery is quite uncommon in my area. Usually it is a smaller truck. Often these trucks either have a lift gate, or a crane attached, or a Spyder forklift attached.
As has been said, someone did not think the logistics of the delivery through very well. Here, at my house, I would just borrow the neighbor’s forklift. Or use my cherry picker (engine hoist), or the bucket on my tractor. If the semi gets stuck in my neighborhood, it is seriously off road.
I bought a TIG welder about ten years ago. It’s not a big item, maybe 2 cubic feet (though it did weigh 150+ pounds), but it arrived in a 53’ trailer. Don’t know why.
About fifteen years ago I was relocating, and when the big-ass moving truck arrived at my old place to pick up my things, they couldn’t get close to my apartment. The “belly box” hanging from the underside of the trailer between the front/rear undercarriages prevented the whole rig from getting over the hump in the parking lot. The movers had to park the truck about fifty yards away and do a “long carry.” They were not happy about it.
Anyone moving in to that apartment complex would encounter the same problem.
I live on a very small, curving road next to a big road and have seen four big lorries (equivalent to your semi-trucks, I think - not the sort that would make deliveries to houses) crash at the corner of my small road, and a few more get stuck and have to be surrounded by a police cordon while they get unstuck. I assume the drivers are relying on satnavs or something.
One time I also got stuck in traffic because a lorry got stuck under a bridge that was too tall for it.
Due to the nature of the business, a lot of the drivers aren’t from the area they’re driving through - I mean, we’re talking deliveries crossing several countries, or in your case, states - which increases the likelihood of going down streets that are unsuitable.
Isn’t there a village in England being driven insane by misdirected heavy traffic trying to pass through it - some mapping error that indicates the through road is much bigger than it is?
I believe you mean that it was too tall for the bridge. Which is not an uncommon occurrence, and one of my recurring nightmares when I am on the road somewhere new.
Things are better these days with GPS (If it is decent and set up to take vehicle size into account. Big money in creating/selling trucking GPS here in the states. You can get by with a smart phone in cars, but Google doesn’t do semis.) but even the best is not completely accurate. The company I drive for has a dedicated GPS in the Qualcomm console in each truck, but it still sends us on weird routes. Like through a residential section instead of going another mile down the road to a state route that goes directly to the factory.
There is one place we deliver in downtown Baltimore which is a pain to get backed into. The GPS used to send us down a route that was easy to use and led to a left turn directly to the warehouse. Unfortunately, there is a bridge on that road that is only 13 ft. tall, which does not work well for a truck that is 13 ft. 6 in. tall. We had to be sure to warn new drivers to not follow the GPS for that delivery. They finally fixed that one.
For the OP, we only deliver to warehouses and factories most of the time. And we still spend quite a bit of time driving through/delivering to residential areas, especially in the northeast. Lots of places like that in the big cities there, and it is not unusual to have to take liberties with some traffic laws to make the delivery. One place in Chicago, I took up 3 1/2 lanes of traffic out of 5 while sitting in the dock getting unloaded. And there is a delivery we make in NYC where the only way to get to the dock in a large truck is to go the wrong way on a one way street.
Generally the people shipping these goods aren’t amateurs. When they ship something, they usually specify that the recipient have a loading dock or facilities for unloading. There’s usually some small print or something that says you’re responsible for getting the stuff off the truck. Most of my experience has been with heavy woodworking equipment, but I imagine it’s the same for, say, pallets of lumber.
You would think that, but I have arrived at repeat customers and when I opened the trailer, the stuff wasn’t on pallets. And the customer didn’t have any of the clamp forklifts required to get the stuff off the truck. The paperwork called for it all to be palletized, but the guys loading the trailer didn’t pay attention. Then there was the time they loaded it all on a 53 ft. trailer, when the paperwork specified it needed to be on a 48. The driver of that load knew the delivery location and refused to take it until it was reloaded, a 53 footer would not have fit.
