The Little River Drainage District (LRDD) in Missouri maintains a system made up of 1,000 miles of drainage ditches and 300 miles of levees, that require constant maintenance.
On a routine basis, LRDD crews mow and excavate channels, and mow and maintain levees, says W. Dustin Boatwright, PE, Executive Vice President and Chief Engineer for LRDD.
Special application machines from Caterpillar OEM Solutions
“We’ve been running Cat® equipment for over 50 years with LRDD,” Boatwright says. “It’s a name that we’ve learned to trust and that’s been good to us. We provide a service to our landowners, our agricultural operators, commercial development, homeowners, and others who own land in the district. Our goal is to provide the highest level of flood control and drainage to our landowners at the least amount of cost. Caterpillar has enabled us to do that.”
“Working with Caterpillar OEM Solutions, we are able to buy a base excavator without a stick and boom,” Boatwright adds. “Caterpillar OEM Solutions provides us with the engineering designs and specs and then we’re able to provide that information to an outside custom front manufacturer. The custom manufacturer is also able to work directly with Caterpillar OEM Solutions to ensure that the fronts match up precisely to the machine. What we found is if you can dream it up, Caterpillar OEM Solutions can make it happen.”
LRDD owns Cat 324E and 326F Excavators with 60-ft. fronts equipped with five-foot custom mower attachments that cut through debris and undergrowth up to 6-8 inches in diameter.
“There’s no comparison to the old days when we would use a Kaiser blade to cut one-half mile per week—today we cut 10 miles a week,” says William D. Boatwright, South District Foreman.
“One of the things that Caterpillar OEM Solutions has been able to deliver that others have not is an auxiliary hydraulic circuit on the excavator that is dedicated directly to the mower to help operate their custom hydraulic mowing machine.”
“It actually helps us increase the productivity of that machine because we’re not losing power to the tracks or to the boom or to the stick while we’re operating the machine,” W. Dustin Boatwright says. “That’s something that we have reached out to other companies and talked to them about, but Caterpillar OEM Solutions is the only one that’s been able to provide us what we need.”
LRDD also purchased six 336F Frontless Hydraulic Excavators equipped with 65-ft front boom/stick configurations and 1.25 cu. yd., 72 in. ditch cleaning buckets for cleanout work. Working with Caterpillar OEM Solutions and local dealer Fabick Cat, LRDD also acquired a Cat 352F Variable Gauge Frontless Hydraulic Excavator and fitted it with an 82-ft. front boom/stick and 1.25 cu. yd., 60 in. ditch cleaning bucket.
“These custom excavators enable LRDD to excavate our large channels from both sides of the channel and complete the work twice as fast as we did before, covering as much as two miles of channels in three weeks,” says South District Foreman William D. Boatwright. “It’s unbelievable. We get twice the work done now.”
“WHAT WE FOUND IS IF YOU CAN DREAM IT UP, CATERPILLAR OEM SOLUTIONS CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN.”
Channel maintenance requires mowing the overgrowth and clearing out the debris, cleaning out and scouring the bottom of the channels flat and swinging up the bucket loads of sediment and placing them alongside the rims of the channels: building the berms up to ensure water flows away from the channels to fight erosion; and cutting the sides of the channels at smooth 1-2:1 slopes for rapid, unimpeded water flow.
The work crews also operate a team of D7 Dozers for land leveling and road building, along with 963 Track Loaders equipped with specially designed multipurpose buckets with thumbs to remove larger trees and heavier debris that has grown up on the banks of the channels. The 963s also do brush piling, dirt moving and truck loading.
