Larson Trucking's "Big Green" helps the nation go green

by Kelli Boylen
freelance writer

Wind turbines are huge. The towers raise more than 300 feet into the sky, topped with blades more than 100 feet in length and turbines weighing in at more than 92 tons.
Although most people have seen wind farms as they become more numerous across the United States, not everyone has stopped for a moment to think about how they got there.
Larry Larson of Larson Trucking, rural Harpers Ferry, knows all about how the wind farms got there because he is one of the people who help make it happen. For about four years Larson has hauled sections of the towers for wind turbines.
Larson started out in trucking in 1985 in California, hauling general freight after leaving the Navy. Over the years he hauled livestock, meat and produce, and about seven years ago he started hauling oversize loads for Bassett Trucking of Wauzeka, WI. He hauled things such as asphalt equipment and big silos for bulk storage, such as those used in milk processing plants and even an airplane fuselage.
He says working for those three years at Bassett Trucking was “one of the best jobs” he’s worked. And, the skills he gained there also helped lead him to the job that he loves today.
“You need to have a lot of experience with over-dimensional loads; loads that are wide, long, tall and heavy,” he explains. “Not every truck driver can jump in and haul these big babies down the road.”
As an independent contractor, Larson is leased on to Midwest Specialized out of Rochester, MN, and works hand-in-hand with Anderson Trucking  out of St. Cloud, MN.  His contract/load coordinator/dispatch person is Dean Onsgard. The wind turbine towers are hauled for Siemans Energy and General Electric.
Larson started out hauling the top section of the three sections of the windmill towers, a load that weighed in at 118,000 pounds and measured 118 feet long and about 13 feet wide. In comparison, a standard semi trailer is 53 feet long, 8.5 feet wide and 13.5 feet high. A standard semi trailer empty weighs about 30,000 pounds empty, and fully loaded weights in at about 80,000 pounds.
After three years of the top sections, Larson is now hauling the mid-section of the towers, which are even higher and wider. The towers he now hauls are 14 feet two inches wide, 82 feet long (which ends up being 180 feet long bumper to bumper), and weigh 220,000 pounds.
A standard semi and trailer together are about 65 feet long. Larson's current loads (with his semi) are about three times as long as a regular semi going down the road. His semi is built specifically for heavy haul with extra heavy suspensions, frame, drive trains, and it has the fourth axle unlike a rig that is set up for hauling general freight.
The average semi alone weighs around 20,000 pounds and Larson’s “Big Green” weighs 29,000 pounds. The combination of the truck and trailer has 50 tires total. Unloaded, bumper to bumper the truck and trailers are 110 feet in length.
A standard semi and trailer has five axles, Larson's two specialized trailers and semi total 13 axles and four pivot points. His set-up weighs 100,000 pounds empty, and up to 240,000 pounds fully loaded.
There are a lot of regulations when it comes to hauling such loads. He can only be on the road from sun up to sun down. He can not travel at all on holidays, such as Labor Day. There are often time restrictions the day before holidays as well, and in some major cities there are rush hour traffic curfews.
Some states require him to travel at 40 miles an hour, others say he can travel the posted speed limit but the company he works for does put an upper limit of 60 miles an hour on him no matter what the posted speed to help maintain safety. Some states say that if the temperature is over 85 degree they can’t travel since the load will tear up the asphalt. Midwest Specialized does help him keep abreast of the many rules and regulations, but ultimately he is responsible for knowing and obeying them.
Larson travels with a front and rear escort at all times, while loaded, and some states require them when he is empty since the trailer even while empty is considered oversized. In some states a police escort is also required. Sometimes when hauling out of Manitowoc, WI they have to do night moves to avoid traffic.
It would seem logical that these large loads would go down the interstate, but Larson says 99 percent of his hauling is on two-lane highways. There is a very good reason for this: the standard overpass on an interstate highway is less than 14 feet tall, and his loads require 15 feet, eight inches of clearance.
“On all occasions we are driving several miles ‘out-of-the-way’ of the shortest or most direct route due to clearances and turning radiuses,” Larson explains. He enjoys the two lane compared to driving on the interstates. “I get to see a lot of small towns that are not seen from the interstate and I find the restaurants have better food.”
A company is hired to survey the potential routes for the oversize loads, checking for bridge clearance, power lines and other potential issues. All of his routes are predetermined before he ever starts out, and he does all he can to stay moving on the route during daylight hours. “We try to not stop until we are done for the night,” he says.
Turning corners is a very, very big deal. It takes Larson and Brandon Gluch of Waukon, who is his rear escort and certified steerman, anywhere from a minute to two hours to make a turn, depending upon the intersection’s angle and width.
Gluch gets out of his escort vehicle and, while walking behind the trailers, uses a remote control to manually steer the back of the second trailer. Using this system they can work the trailers around a 90-degree intersection.
“Every intersection presents a challenge,” he says. “It often requires a lot of patience.”
Other challenges on any given day could include driving to the site where the towers will be erected through corn or bean fields where it may be easy to get stuck, or the back road to the wind farm site could have soft shoulders. Although Larson has not become stuck or tipped, he has seen it happen often enough to know he always needs to be alert.
Although Gluch travels with Larson on all the trips since he started on the job earlier this year, he hires available certified drivers to be the front escort.
Larson and Gluch do their own loading and unloading of their massive cargo. If all goes well, they can load or unload one of the 82-foot tower sections onto or from the two end-to-end trailers in about an hour.
After the section is loaded, someone has to crawl through the tower section with the air and electrical lines that connect the rear trailer to the truck's air and electrical system, and all the sections Larson has hauled have had ladders inside of them that they have to crawl around.  Two years ago he was picking up towers in Rochelle, IL that had been shipped in to Mexico from Spain and then brought up by rail. Those towers had the added surprise of black widow spiders nesting inside of  them.
Even refueling needs to be well-planned. Larson explains that they need to find a place to unhook the trailers, drive the semi to a truck stop, and then return and hook the trailers back up.
Stopping for the night also requires unhooking the load at an area large enough to leave the trailers and tower, and then driving up to 30 miles to a motel. But most times Larson sleeps in his truck and Gluch in his escort vehicle.
Larson hauls from tower and windmill manufacturing plants in Wisconsin, Illinois, North Dakota and Texas. He also picks up towers in Michigan which are shipped from a manufacturing plant in Canada.
The frequency that he is able to return home varies greatly with where he is hauling from and the location they are taking the tower to. Last summer he hauled from Wisconsin to a wind farm in Iowa and was able to come home often. One job this summer found him making trips from Illinois to southern Texas, a trip of 1,600 miles one way.
“That is the only bad thing about this job, is that it keeps me away from my wife, Ruth, and our boys,” he says. “I might be gone from home for 10 or 14 days, or it might be for three months. I never know from project to project.” He misses a lot of the boys’ activities.
Ruth and their boys, Lukas and Lars, are as involved as they can be, including already learning how to do the remote, manual steering and driving the semi. Ruth serves as Larson Trucking's Chief Financial Officer.
Cell phones and Larson’s laptop computer have been a blessing for working on the road. “I like knowing I can call home day or night, and that they can call me anytime, and we video chat sometimes.”
When working a job that has short hauls he can transport up to 20 loads in a month. When working on a project that requires many miles of hauling it could only be two or three towers per month. Last year he totaled 84 transports of towers to wind farm sites.
Loaded, his rig gets two miles to the gallon, so it can vary from 200 to 300 miles per tank of diesel. On a good day, he can get up to 500 miles in hauling his cargo.
Larson hauls the windmill towers year-round, but the work can be more difficult and time consuming in the winter months. When there is a slow period for wind towers he hauls machinery for Midwest Specialized.
Wind farms he has hauled to are located in the Pawnee National Grass Lands in Colorado, Remington, IN, Adair, IA, Grand Canyon, AZ, Golthwaite, TX, Diller, NE, Spearville and Cimmarron, KS, and several in southwest Minnesota.