JACKSON HOLE, WYO – Buckrail can’t take credit for the cleanup that’s begun on Teton Pass after yesterday’s story, but we’re happy to share an important update.
Many Buckrailers responded to yesterday’s story about the tater trash with a common challenge: “Why doesn’t somebody just take it upon themselves to clean it up?” The Wyoming “git ‘er done” approach.
Well, that’s exactly what Paul Woodie and Kirby Orme decided to do before the story. Their outfit, Flat Creek Towing, was the company of record that was called to salvage the semi truck that had rolled off Teton Pass late last year.
Woodie said it was heck of a wreck.
“I had no idea the magnitude of what we were going to encounter up there. In 30 years of doing this, it was the absolute worst semi wreck I’ve ever done,” Woodie told Buckrail. “Stuff was strewn for about a football field in length. There was 300 to 400 pound pieces down there. Just getting the frame of the semi up the 400-foot embankment was very difficult. It was embedded in rocks and wrapped around trees. The reefer unit was wedged and hooked into trees four feet off the ground. We spent about eight days in January trying to get everything out but we couldn’t see everything then. There was so much snow you couldn’t tell how much was up there.”
A day before Buckrail’s article came out, Flat Creek Towing had its people up on the pass cleaning up rotting potatoes by hand. Orme and Woodie had decided back in winter they would come back up in spring to finish the job even though their work salvaging the truck was finished and they were under no obligation to cleanup the site.
“We told Highway Patrol we would be back up in the spring,” Woodie said. “Quite honestly we are not obligated to clean it up but my kid mountain bikes up there. It’s just the right thing to do to take care of our community. We’re going to be out 20 or 25 thousand dollars on this job. It’s the cost of doing business, I guess. You don’t make money on all of them.”
A big reason Flat Creek Towing is taking such a hit on the job is a long story. Woodie said the hauling company’s insurer was a shady agency out of Hollywood, Florida run by Russians. “This was an absolute joke of a deal,” Woodie said. “We just finally received partial payment for this job just last week. We’ll never get what they owe us. The trucking company got burned by them too. There was no cargo coverage on the load. Forged documents of insurance. A DOT officer has all the documents but there isn’t much they can do. You shut them down and they just pop up again with new paperwork.”
Flat Creek Towing hired a local lawyer and considered a lawsuit. They even hired a professional private investigator who quit the job after a day’s work fearing for his life saying the Russians running the insurance agency were the kind of people you don’t mess with without winding up dead.
Woodie said he expects his company employees will be up on the pass cleaning up for three or four weeks; it’s that bad. He estimates about 15,000 pounds of potatoes will never get removed.
