Our customer – a leading manufacturer of oil field equipment – was sending our Los Angeles operation a 90-foot long behemoth to prepare for export out of the Port of Los Angeles.

This over-sized shipment was delayed leaving the Houston area because of a hurricane in the region. The weather delay put pressure on the deadline for the item to make it to the Port of Los Angeles for transport via ship to South Korea.

At 6:40 am on a Friday morning, the truck carrying the unit [pictured above] went into a ditch on its way to the Chick facility in Los Angeles. The trucking company called us right away in hopes that we could rescue this time-sensitive delivery; Chick sprung into action.

We immediately dispatched one of our on-site supervisors to the scene. We contacted a local wrecker to lift the trailer out of the ditch. We guided the enormous payload back into position. We even arranged for new permits because the delivery was no longer on its scheduled route. By 1:30 that afternoon, Chick hand-delivered the permits required to move the truck and escorted the unit to Chick’s LA operation to begin the packing process.

Knowing the precise measurement and specs of the payload, Chick had been able to pre-fabricate many ofthe box components in advance. However, we could not pre-fabricate the all-important saddles. Chick crews worked on building these saddles and putting the box components together until midnight that Friday. Burdened by a major storm throughout southern California that evening, our crews were forced to work in the rain to meet the schedule. The outstanding crew came back at 6:00 am on Saturday morning to pack the unit and had the item packed, secured and on its way to the Port of Los Angeles by 11:40 that morning.

The massive and ungainly piece of equipment went from ditch to delivery in just over 24 hours. Not only that, but our expertise, timely response and customer commitment allowed the unit to make its scheduled departure via ship, saving the $275,000 that it would have cost had the unit “missed the boat” and required delivery by air.