What is the NASTIEST stuff you've hauled?

[E7mack96]

I just spent all weekend, including Memorial day, hauling the carcasses of some 5,000 pigs that were bar-b-que'd at a very large fire in Switzerland County, Indiana. Actually, most died of smoke and heat. I have personally never,ever seen anything so foul in my life. They may as well have been human bodies. Guts and gore and blood running out my tailgate. Pics are to follow in a day or 2.



What have you hauled???

 

[DHatfield]

I have never hauled anything nasty, but I sure would hate to be the people following behind you with the smell and the blood running out of the tailgate.

 

[DonBaggett]

If I had to haul something nasty, I have an old pickup bed trailer, but I wouldn't put anything like you have described in the bed of my truck. :{

 

[The patriot]

Mack, I had the misfortune to be behind a few dump trailers that just pulled out of the slaughter house. Good thing I didnt just eat, that would have made me toss my cookies.

My brother used to haul haz-mat all the time. That was very nasty. He also hauled garbage, but some of the haz mat was much worse.

I never really hauled anything nasty, unless you consider a floor load in a van trailer(2000++ pieces) nasty.

When I had my dump trailer, I hauled sand, stone, and dirt. Occasionally I had mulch, and that could get stinky.

Eric

 

[CROW]

Many years ago when I was in college, I worked for a trucker a couple of summers. One of the runs we made infrequently (thankfully) was hauling what was called "fat" from a cattle slaughter house and processing plant to a feedyard. Apparently this was what was left over after cattle were slaughtered and processed. I was told the leftovers were heated to the point they were a liquid. What I know for sure is that the stuff smelled to high heaven and I had to go outside the building when the trailer was being loaded to keep from getting sick. Have never smelled anything that bad since. Worked at a feedlot with thousands of cattle one summer and got used to that odor, it paled in camparison to the odor of the "fat" we hauled.

 

[Bill Stockard]

Eric,



I retired from a medium/heavy duty truck dealership. When one of the packinghuse waste trucks came in for service, the mechanics would head for the back door!!!! A broken down loaded garbage truck is worse--"juice" dripping and maggots falling out on the mechanics working on them. With a down engine, there was no hydraulic power to open and push out the load to empty it first.



The guys would get paid very well for that kind of work!!



Bill

 

[C Schomer]

I hauled haz mat while going to trade school in the early 70's. Rocket fuel, all the concentrated acids etc. I hauled fuming sulfuric to Dow to make PETN primer cord. That stuff would go thru an acid suit and face shield in no time. Hydrazine(one of the ingredients of early rocket fuel) can't even be handled on a humid day - could explode. One driver accidently took a trailer that had 50% caustic in it last to load 66 Baume sulfuric - the trailer was bouncing in the air when the acid hit it! Lots of fun stories and OSHA was in it's infancy then and very little control at the time. Safety showers were rare - so was any supervision! Hauled Caustic soda to a sheep hide cellar. That was the worst smelling place I've been. They used the caustic to dissolve the fat on the hides. Craig

 

[Todd G]

I used to deliver appliances a few years back. I was delivering a new freezer to a house and when I pulled up I could smell something awful.



It turns out the people that owned the house had taken an extended vacation for 3 weeks. The day after they left the brat next door came over and pulled the main lever on hte breaker-box outside. They had a freezer FULL of elk. Think 3 weeks.



The smell eventually brought flies who bored through the seals around the door and procreated inside. When I got there it had a 10 foot circle of slime around the freezer. My boss, who would do anything for a sale, told the people I would haul it away. I wouldn't go near the thing in its present condition! I made the people duct tape around the seals and put a couple layers around the thing to keep the door shut in tranport.



I loaded it on the truck and headed straight for the dump( should have taken it back to the store ). I launched that nasty thing right off the end of my truck. Wouldn't you know that freezer split open as it landed! It was almost pure white inside and moving. :--) I almost lost it when the smell hit me. Even the workers at the dump ran and they can handle anything. I didn't eat for 2 days after that.

 

[rrausch]

Lord have Mercy!

I've never hauled anything that bad!



But I once had to sit for almost a hour in a waiting room BEHIND a big fat fifty-ish female who was wearing a HUGE white tee shirt with a big yellow Tweety Bird on the front, and she had evidently just gone to the bathroom and being very fat... well lets just say she had trouble wiping and accidently used the back of her tee shirt to wipe her bu##. Yup. Big old brown bu## boogers on the back bottom of her tee-shirt. Oh Yeah... made my day!

 

[illflem]

Hard to believe that anything can smell as bad as rotting flesh but rotting Hubbard squash is worse. Hauled a couple of bins in the bed, vibration must have broken open some of the bad ones, the gook dripped into the bed, took forever to air out. I lost my lunch from a forklift distance.

 

[Briar Hopper]

You guys are cracking me up. Can't believe Doc Tinker hasn't found this thread yet.

Haven't hauled anything that nasty smelling but I did haul a load of broken up drywall that tore up the paint on my Ford truck real good.

Stinkiest experience for me was when I was a foreman in the special services group of an electrical contractor, I had to install and hookup a control panel in the pump house of a sewage plant behind a hog slaughterhouse in North Carolina. Two of my men quit, the other two toughed it out. One kept puking, the other one was pale all the time. I ended up using my earplugs as nose plugs, but man, after awhile, it felt like I was tasting pig excrement, just from having to breath through my mouth. We got that part of the job done in 3 days. I lost about 10 lbs. from not being able to eat.

I got stuck behind one of them carcass trucks like Mack 96 is talking about, on my way home from Muncie one time, I was ready to shoot out the tires after 2 miles of following him and being unable to pass !

 

[roadranger]

Years ago I worked as a driver for a feed mill that also owned several chicken Egg Farms. Well, those chicken coop cellars had to be cleaned out regularly, so if you got onto the dispatcher's sh## list, you caught the sh## detail... .



This consisted of hauling around end dump trailers FULL of chicken sh## loaded with maggots from the coops out to farmers' fields to be spread as fertilizer. This didn't bother us too much, as we were traveling in front of the stink most of the time, until it came time to open up that tailgate and dump the mess.



I got pinched for overweight by the State Police one time, and they pulled me into a State Highway Garage yard. While sitting there getting told I had to transfer some of the weight off before I could continue, all of the guys working at the garage evacuated the place. I explained to the cop what a god-awfull stink would be created in the neighborhood trying to offload this crap into another truck. He wisely escorted me to the destination field, and THEN wrote a huge overweight fine to the feed mill.

That was the very last time I got put on the sh## detail!

 

[Fast 1]

I once hauled a chevy pickup that the owner tried to kill himself by blowing his guts out with a shot gun while sitting in the front seat as the sheriff pulled up behind him. He did not kill himself, but he left his guts all over the door panel. I hauled it about 3 months later. The ouside temps. had been cold so it had not gotten gross yet. Kinda looked like beef jerky.



Verlyn

 

[E7mack96]

Poo-poo

I have also hauled the poop that is remaining after the water treatment plant does its' thing to the raw sewage.



Once had a city cop pull me over and want to know what I'm hauling. Before I can answer, He proceeds to grab a handfull of human feces.



He was not a happy camper.

 

[QRTRHRS]

Get past the smell, you got it made!

Worst thing I ever hauled was fly ash. Doesn't stink fortunately but is insidious when it comes to filtering into the cab and everything else.



I used to live downwind of a drug plant. Before they got it under control, the air would often smell like a cat box from making vitamin C. The sludge from this was right up there with animal waste. While dumping at a landfill one day where this sludge went, some poor dude got his pickup stuck. There was maybe six inches or so of muck, mostly this waste product. Bulldozer man backs up says grab the chain and hook on. Guy had to kneel down and find a holding spot for the chain. Man, he was looking sweet until he got done.

 

[DMalone]

Byproducts

I have had to startup a refrigertion unit in a byproducts plant. These are the places that all the dead farm aminals go. Beleive me i saw a cow that was about 5 times its normal size arrive and two workers with knifes went out and stabbed it it let the air out and i lost my lunch. But those guys started cutting it down in pieces, wow what a man. I can not tell you how bad that crap smells, never again boys.

 

[E7mack96]

Fly Ash

I haul Fly Ash every Day in my Dump truck. It does get into every nook and cranny in the cab.

 

[MBurke]

Nasty

I once gave my mother in law a ride to town in my truck. Top that!!!

 

[JHansen]

LOL@MBurke!!!! That's killer man!



In my previous life I drove a 6 axle full truck/full trailer tank unit through the wilds of east central Alberta hauling whatever production fluids I could fit through the pump! Produced water was fun to haul at -40..... I hauled some heavy oil down south when I first started that flowed like molasses at 70F-had to be heated way up to make it pump halfways decent... ... but probably the worst stuff I ever hauled was unstabilized condensate. I had a few sites that had some real snaky stuff... ... dunno what the Reid Vapor Pressure was as at that time we never really cared but it was wild stuff. Gasoline is around a density of 725 g/ml IIRC..... some of the stuff I hauled was 650 g/ml. Had a load on once that was a screaming 629-tons of butane in that stuff-was virtually impossible to handle. Vaporizes when you try to lift it up the hump in the swing hose..... most of the time you had to unload the truck, uncouple from the trailer, pull a load onto the truck from the sump of the trailer, move back up front, unload, repeat procedure as necessary! Needless to say you made damn sure your ground cables were attached securely and nobody not essential to the procedure was nowheres near-no sense in tying someone else up in the big boom!



In the last year or two they've gotten pretty stringent at the delivery points about maximum RVP so now it's pretty hard to get the thrills I used to-too bad they hadn't gotten around to it 6 years ago or so!



J

 

[QRTRHRS]

I think groceries might be the worst. Besides all the fingerprinting, seems like every warehouse is run by someone resembling Danny De Vito's character Louie from the TV show Taxi.