Heavy Metal Virtuosos : Expert Operators Show Their Stuff in Backhoe Rodeo

Backhoe operator Don Farmer gazed down at the fragile egg--looking like a marble next to his giant machine--and fixed on doing the seemingly impossible.

With a quick but deliberate jerk of the gears, he muscled the hulking yellow beast up to the egg on the small pile of dirt and cautiously lifted the orb with a spoon taped to the tractor’s claw-like scoop. Then with one fluid motion, Farmer spun the scoop about 10 feet toward a small green basket, into which he gently eased the egg.

All in less than 30 seconds.

“It’s all about finesse rather than speed,” Farmer said Friday after his try in the Backhoe Rodeo’s Egg Lift contest. “It’s like in the field, you have to learn to move close and easy. Or you end up like me last week, when I hit a gas line.”

Despite his valiant effort, Farmer was beaten by Gary Schaffer of Southwest Gas Co., who scored a winning time of just 22.25 seconds.

Such antics dazzled the crowd at the event, which drew hundreds of heavy equipment operators from cities, counties, public utilities, oil and telephone companies and elsewhere.

Part competition, part trade show, it was sponsored by Underground Service Alert, a nonprofit group that operates a clearinghouse for excavation crews inquiring about underground utility lines.

The group, which celebrated its 20th anniversary Friday, collects information on underground lines from more than 700 Southern California companies and utilities, including Pacific Bell, Southern California Gas and Southern California Edison.

The rodeo “is a lot of fun for [professionals] to get to show off the skills they’ve developed,” said Ron Olitsky, president of Underground Service Alert. “Most people don’t realize it, but there’s a lot of sensitivity and dexterity needed to operate this kind of equipment.”

And it was quite a sight to see--eight backhoes, grunting and groaning around a dirt field, with their drivers coaxing them through the most delicate of tasks.

By far the most difficult, competitors said, was the Bowling Ball Stomp. That event was also won by Schaffer, who painstakingly lifted and dropped three color-coded bowling balls into corresponding car tires. Schaffer’s time of 1 minute, 7 seconds easily earned him a first place plaque, event organizers said.

With a time of 10.31 seconds, Earl Bunker of the city of Paramount’s sewer and water department captured first place in the Bowling Ball and Pin.

In that event, competitors used a bowling ball that was tied by a rope to the backhoe’s scoop. They then attempted to knock over 10 pins without touching the bowling ball to the ground or using the rope to hit the pins.

Some of the contestants said the skills they displayed Friday were quite similar to those used in their daily work.

The Pipe Slide event, for instance, was “just like you’d pick up a pipe in the ground” said Todd Kelly, a technician with the Capistrano Valley Water District. Except that the pipe then had to be dropped into another, slightly larger pipe, an arduous task that was completed by winner Corky Anderson, of S.J. Burkhardt Co., in a mere 14 seconds.

“You have to be that delicate, though,” Kelly said. “When you knock people out of water and power, they’re [angry]. Not to mention that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can kill someone.”

The seriousness of their jobs notwithstanding, most of the participants Friday seemed to take a lighthearted approach to their competitions, which yielded pewter belt buckles and plaques for the top winners. Cries such as “You owe me 20 bucks,” and, “There goes the Western seaboard,” could be heard among colleagues.

However, perhaps in the spirit of their cowboy counterparts, some of the participants appeared to take the event very seriously, Olitsky said.

“One guy called me up yesterday and asked how he could get his own backhoe out here,” Olitsky said. “I told him ‘Come on, this is just for fun.”