Barrel Truck Protection for Workzone Crews
- Equipment
- Maintenance operations
- Roadway/roadside
Innovation
In Wisconsin, county highway departments maintain county and State road systems, including interstates. Highway staff often must set up and remove temporary traffic controls on high-speed, multi-lane roads where the risk of serious injury—or worse—is greatly elevated. Marathon County wanted to prioritize worker safety while still being able to remove drums from highway work zones efficiently. They used a barrel truck to reduce worker exposure to live traffic while lowering costs by decreasing crew size. While the truck drives slowly in reverse from the end of the work zone to the beginning, a mounted retrieval arm steers the barrels toward the back of the truck, where a mechanism lifts and loads them automatically.
Benefit and Implementation
With an old sign truck chassis as its base, the barrel truck was developed and built entirely in-house by one lead mechanic in approximately
110 hours at a total cost of $17,000. It has been used almost daily for the past two years with no safety incidents.
