Construction site delivery, planned before the truck leaves

Why a job site is not a dock

A warehouse has a dock, a forklift, a receiving clerk and hours on the door. A job site has a gate with a guard who has never heard of your load, a road of compacted gravel that was fine for pickups and is not fine for a lowboy, a laydown yard that moved last week, a crane that is booked by the hour, and a superintendent whose phone is on silent. Most failed deliveries on a build are not trucking failures. They are a truck that arrived when nothing was ready for it.

So we treat the site as the first question, not the last. Before a truck is dispatched to a job site we have the gate location and the check in procedure, the hours the site receives and whether it receives on Saturdays, the laydown or set down point, the equipment that will unload and who operates it, the ground conditions on the route from the gate to that point, and the name and phone of the person who signs.

Matching the truck to the site

A 53 foot trailer needs about 100 feet of turning room and a road that will take 80,000 pounds. A lowboy with an oversize module needs more. If the site cannot take that, the answer may be a shorter trailer, a different gate, a delivery to a nearby laydown yard with a smaller truck shuttling the last mile, or a crane set from the public road under a permit. We work that out with the contractor before the truck leaves, and the driver gets the plan, the site map and the contact in writing, not a street address and good luck.

Ground conditions decide the rest. A lowboy that leaves the pavement onto soft ground does not come back out under its own power. Where the site is still dirt, we ask for crane mats or a stabilized road to the pad, or we deliver to the nearest firm ground and let the site's equipment take it from there.

Crane days and laydown

Heavy pieces are lifted straight from the trailer to the pad, which means the truck has to be there on the crane day, within the crane's window, in the order the crane crew wants the pieces. We schedule the trucks to the crane calendar and confirm the day before. When the slab or the pad is not ready, the piece goes to the laydown yard on cribbing or dunnage, under cover if it must stay dry, rather than waiting on the trailer with detention running.

Lighter freight, such as racks, cable, conduit and crated parts, is unloaded by the site forklift or by a lift gate on the truck, and we confirm the forklift's capacity against the heaviest piece on the trailer before dispatch.

Data center sites in particular

A data center campus adds its own rules. Security is strict: drivers are checked in by name, often need identification at the gate, and may be escorted on site. Many campuses have a dedicated logistics gate and a marshalling area where trucks wait to be called forward, with delivery windows assigned in advance. Some require a certificate of insurance on file before the truck arrives. We collect those requirements from the general contractor at the start and give the driver what the gate will ask for.

Many of the large campuses going up across the West sit in markets where our fleet and our vetted carriers already pick up and deliver: the Phoenix area, the Inland Empire, Las Vegas, the Reno area, Salt Lake City, Hillsboro and Portland, the Puget Sound, Sacramento and the Bay Area.

What we need to quote a site delivery

• The site address, the gate to use and the check in procedure, including any insurance or identification requirement
• Hours the site receives, and whether weekend or night delivery is possible or required
• The set down point, the unloading equipment and the crane day if there is one
• The road from the gate to the set down point: paved, gravel or dirt, and the turning room
• The site contact who signs, and a second contact for when the first is in a meeting