Okla. city finds a way to get back on track with maintenance work

By: Michael T. Norman

Like many municipalities in the U.S., the lack of modern equipment had put the city of McAlester, Okla., way behind schedule on its ditch and canal maintenance work. In fact, Assistant Public Works Supervisor Timmy Don Adams said that the lack of the right equipment was the reason why the city had not been able to do much work in those areas for two years.

With a population of 130,000, some 150 miles of streets and 13 parks covering over 100 acres, there was plenty of work to do when the city took delivery of an XL 3100 IV excavator from Kirby-Smith Machinery, Inc., the nearby Gradall distributor.

“The XL 3100 IV hasn’t had a lot of downtime since we got it two months ago,” said Tim Adams, the city street superintendent. “We use it to repair streets, clean out ditches and canals, repair storm drains, cut grade for sidewalks and streets . . . you name it. One day, we used it like a crane to lift up a pump at the sewer plant.”

Earlier, the city had owned other Gradall excavators, including a G3WD model that finally wore out. In fact, city officials were still used to the yellow paint scheme on the G3WD and never took notice in the change back to high-visibility yellow on the XL 3100 IV, which the city equipped with ditching and pavement-removal buckets.

“The automatic transmission was something we were looking for,” said Cliff Pitner, who works in the city’s engineering department and wrote the specification for the machine purchase. “We move it around to a lot of different jobs doing drainage work, canal cleanup, patch work on streets and overcutting soft sponge areas. We also like the telescoping boom that can be telescoped out” for work that doesn’t allow for any overhead clearance.

For more information about XL 3100 IV Gradall excavators and attachments, visit www.gradall.com , or call 330-339-2211.