FINDING A WAY

Travis Dye lay in the hospital bed, wondering about how his life had changed.

His right arm was no more, removed by surgeons following a near-fatal motorcycle accident. After the obvious worries subsided – about how he would live with just one arm and whether he ever would race his motorcycle again – the 21-year-old landed on perhaps the most unsettling thought.

What about his job?

Travis never went to college. Construction work was all he knew. Just two weeks before his accident, he had started a new job running a Volvo excavator for CS Carey Inc., a respected Kansas City land-clearing company. His job was to feed whole trees into a grinder in the field.

It wasn’t soft work.

"What are you going to do with just one arm?" he recalled asking himself.

But Travis already had caught the eye of CS Carey founder Chris Carey. A Superbike racer himself, Chris appreciated the skills the young man brought to the table. You make a lot of decisions at 160 mph. And while operating an excavator and grinder in tandem, you do the same.

"Travis has that mechanical sense. He’s not going to take his bike onto the track not prepared," Chris said. "That same mindset can be used in running our high-end machines. We didn’t want to lose that person."

So on his way to the hospital, Chris set in motion the unprecedented: Converting a Volvo EC210C excavator to be used by an operator who was missing a limb. The response from Volvo: No problem.

Minutes later, Chris was standing at Travis’ bedside, delivering the news. It was a scene he wouldn’t forget.

"Picture a guy losing his arm in the prime of his life, and to be able to hold onto his work at the same place he was before … " he said.
"It meant the world," Travis added.

Sold on Volvo

Chris Carey started his company back when he was 12 years old, pushing lawn mowers around his neighborhood. Eventually, he was clearing land for his father’s development company. As his reputation grew, Carey’s team was called to clean up debris from an ice storm that devastated Kansas City in 1996, and he regularly spent the fall chasing hurricane clean-up jobs along the coasts.

Back then, he was running Komatsu equipment. But in the dusty environment surrounding tree removal jobs, his machinery tended to overheat. That’s when he found Volvo. The company first purchased a Volvo L90 wheel loader. Impressed with its fuel efficiency, he bought more.

"That was back in 2003 – when diesel was cheap," Chris said. "When fuel is so expensive, it’s nice to know we have the most efficient machine made."

Within a couple of years, Chris had converted his entire fleet to Volvo. That includes six of Volvo’s most versatile excavators, ranging from the 21-ton EC210C to the 29-ton EC290B. Some of them spend their days in the field, following Volvo wheel loaders around future housing developments or utility right-of-way. The loaders push over trees, and the excavators load them into trucks or grinders.

Back at the company’s yard, more excavators finish putting debris through grinders, where it is turned into mulch, colored and sold to landscaping companies.

Chris says the versatility of his Volvo excavators makes them so appealing. They have fast cycle times, making quick work of both raw brush and mulch. The Volvos also don’t overheat in the dusty environment as their grapples and saws move piles of brush, Chris says. That’s thanks to Volvo’s side-by-side cooling layout with dual cooling fans.

Equipped for Anything

But all of that took a backseat on June 14, 2008. Travis was riding his street bike when a car didn’t see him on a blind corner and turned into his lane. He slammed into the side of the car.

The surgeons removed his right arm just above the elbow. They put his left arm in a cast. The result left the racer – the man who had his life laid out in front of him, invincible – relying on family and friends for everything, from eating to dressing.

But he recovered. And just three months later, he was standing next to his new Volvo excavator. He has Chris Carey, who racked his brain for days after the wreck, to thank for that.

"I was thinking there’s got to be a way of taking the functions from the right-hand joystick and bring them to the left," Chris said. "I felt like we would have to do it ourselves."

But he called his Volvo dealer, Kansas City’s G.W. Van Keppel Co.

"I figured (Volvo’s support staff) would jump all over this. And they did," said Kevin Ash, a Van Keppel sales representative. "They were back to us the next day with their ideas and a plan to make this work. It’s hard to top that for support."

The wheels indeed turned quickly. Volvo product manager Eric Yeomans and product specialist Joel Escalante went to work converting a new Volvo EC210C to a never-seen-before configuration – moving the functions of the right joystick elsewhere in the cab. They added grapple and boom functions to the right and left pedals. The grapple also can be opened and closed with the left stick. But the right stick remained intact, allowing other operators to use the machine in Travis’ absence.

"It was really exciting to see how excited they were to be presented with a challenge," Chris says. "They e-mailed a picture that day showing its design capabilities. I showed it to Travis. It just made his day. It gave him hope that this is what it’s going to be like."

Three months later, Travis was using a grapple saw on his Volvo to sort, stack and grind every pile of trees and brush coming into the CS Carey yard. Just a week on the job with his new machine, he looked every bit the seasoned operator. The exercise actually was helping him with his hand-eye coordination. He’s now left-handed, after all.

"It’s done everything I ever needed it to," Travis said, after hopping down from a day’s work.

And in case you’re wondering, he already has gotten back on his motorcycle. He hopes to start racing again soon.

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