By Janice Hoppe-Spiers
In its most recent report, the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration estimates there were 96,626 crashes in work zones in 2015. On average, a work zone crash occurred once every 5.4 minutes. Seventy work zone crashes occurred every day that resulted in at least one injury and 12 work zone crashes happened every week that resulted in at least one fatality.
Working on the highway from 2009 to 2016 for a private company in Kentucky, Kyle Ruby saw firsthand how dangerous the work zones were and sought ways to eliminate the risk for himself and his coworkers. His shift with the asphalt pavement milling crew ran from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. on an interstate highway.
“At the end of the shift, we had to move the barrels back off the road and it would take an hour and ten minutes to move all the barrels,” Ruby remembers. “We were only allowed 30 minutes so we tried every way possible to get them moved quicker. I would drop three guys off to pick up the barrels and come back to pick them up. A driver saw the third guy moving the barrel one day and thought the lane was open, and he about hit my guy.”
Witnessing that firsthand and hearing about the tragedies that had occurred on the highway, Ruby wanted to do something to change those statistics and help his crew. In 2015 he started to build the BarrelMover 5000. “My dad works for a fabrication shop and I told him what I needed and how long the steel needed to be,” Ruby remembers. “We forklifted it, put it on his truck and drove it out here to our small metal shop at my house. I put it together the weekend of Good Friday. I took five steps forward and 10 steps backwards – it was a pain in my ass every time, but I built five of them.”
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