Another year, another marathon...
Naturally the goal of this year's marathon video was to be bigger and better than last year's-and I succeeded. This year I started my journey bright and early around 8am in Downtown LA and finished a little before 4pm in Santa Monica (the longest I've spent actively filming a single video). I'm very pleased how it turned out and you'll get a good look at the massive cleanup operation that takes place after the marathon in all 4 cities the marathon passes through. This video has it all, from front loaders to wheel loaders, from rear loaders to sweepers, from automated side loaders to semi-trailer dump trucks, from PB loaders to flatbeds.
First up we have the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services' breathtaking operation-3 semi trailer dump trucks, 2 Caterpillar loaders, 4 PB loaders, and 12 street sweepers plus dozens of extra laborers. The Cats are the first to come through, grabbing the largest piles and boxes and load them directly into the dump trailers. Then the PB loaders pass through and grab whatever they can, and leaving the sweepers to get everything left over. When the sweepers fill up they can dump on-site into any of the dump trailers or PB loaders. The highlight of LA's operation for me was definitely the PB loaders as they are normally very hard to film, not to mention the fact they pulled out one of (if not the last) 2005 Peterbilt, which I thought were long gone.
From LA proper (Downtown to Hollywood), we head to the City of West Hollywood where Athens was running one front loader for the large stuff, and leaving the rest of the work to a large handful of sweepers from CleanStreet.
After West Hollywood, we move onto Beverly Hills. Here the city was running 3 rear loaders and two tractors for the big stuff and a fleet of sweepers for the rest. The rear loaders included their Freightliner McNeilus (not seen in the video) and their brand new 2017 CCC LET2/New Way Cobra, each of which were paired up with a tractor. The Cobra looks awesome with its light setup on the cab and black rims, not to mention it has an exceptionally fast packer. Also running was their little New Way Diamondback manually collecting whatever it could.
Lastly we head to the last 3 miles of the marathon in Santa Monica (LA was running the exact same fleet in Century City and Westwood that they had been earlier, so it didn't make it into the video). Unlike the other cities, Santa Monica had plopped down roughly 70 300 gallon containers at all of the water stations to contain as much material as possible to make the cleanup process much simpler. Santa Monica's fleet consisted of 2 automated side loaders, 3 flatbeds, 4 sweepers and a handful of little dump trucks. The side loaders passed by first to empty all of the 300s. This would've been the perfect time for a couple Scorpions to shine but unfortunately both drivers working haven't been trained on them yet so they were left with 2 slow Curbtenders. After the Curbtenders pulled through the flatbeds followed with a handful of workers to grab, stack, and haul all of the empty 300s. Then finally the sweepers swept through to leave everything nice and shiny. The dump trucks kinda did their own thing and grabbed all the cardboard trash cans and anything else large.
In the end, I left with about 90 minutes of footage... This is the edited version, but the PB Loaders from LA City and the Santa Monica Curbtenders will be getting their own full videos. I had a great time traveling across the city, and many thanks to the many city employees and other workers moving quickly and efficiently to get the roads back open. Filmed March 19th, 2017 between Downtown LA and Santa Monica.
6 сен 2024