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My name is John Pausma, president of Service Sanitation.
This particular event happened on September 8th and we refer to it as the
Chicago half marathon
We were called on to provide the portable restrooms and we've been doing this for
five years now, I believe. The challenge for us on a race is just so many people
in one spot at one time. The start is at 7:00 o'clock.
You've got thousands of runners in this one area between 6:00am and 7:00am
o'clock
and you just need enough portable restrooms to be able to get the people through
the lines and be able to participate in the race.
When you're talking about an event the size of the Chicago Half Marathon
we are in the 20-25 truckload in and out for
an event this size. We setup 115 restrooms up and down a
7 mile area of the course. Then we come back and we have a waiting period.
The aid stations come in and they start setting up. We're available if they need
us on that but for the most part we're kind of watching.
Then when they give us the go head we start following down the path
and we are probably on the
tightest time restraints of any event we've had
to pickup these restrooms.
We are out there running up and down the street trying to get these restrooms loaded up and moved
on to the next aid station so the roads
can get open. The first two or three years we just did the portable restrooms
and then from there we've added services.
There's 10 aid stations on this particular course
Each aid station needs a certain amount of supplies They need X number of tables,
X number of skids of water, X numbers
of Gatorade coolers. The challenges of providing the aid station manor in the
way that they used to do it was that there were so many trucks involved.
The water truck was a big semi-truck and they had to get the skids
of water removed from the truck
and delivered to each station and then there was the tables
and the tents. There was all these different trucks that had to make the stops along
the way
and because this was on Lake Shore Drive you couldn't really deliver it the night
before
So I think logistically we could see that
the organizers were challenged in making this all happen
and at some point we ended up with a system that we said,
"You know we could provide that service". So what happens is the
event organizers deliver us the Ryder trucks to our location
and then they deliver us all the supplies. Our job is to take all the
material
package it onto that aid station truck, we get all that stuff organized
get it load it up and then the trucks are ready to go. This event becomes the most
challenging because of the time restraints.
We literally are driving our trucks on the
course, directly behind runners.
It's a little complicated because you don't want to feel like you're pushing the
runners because
they're participants in an event but at the same time we're under time restraints
from the city
Directly behind us are the cops and directly behind them is
live traffic waiting to go back on to the road. So this is unlike others where
we're actually
being pushed along by the police, by the traffic, to get off the road and open the
roads back up. I've always found
that it's not only a lot of fun to get out and work.
This is a high profile event, it's exciting, it's adrenaline as you're
under time restraints but it's great to work along with the guys
that you're trying to cheer along with all year long. These guys do a lot of hard
work for us
a lot of crazy hours, nights, mornings, weekends.
It builds a lot of moral so I've always enjoyed doing it. Like I said, it's also an
adrenaline rush on this one. It's just kind of a fun morning.
Ok, so you can see with an event this size
you need a good partner and I think
this particular race organizer views Service Sanitation as a good partner
for this event.
We provide the portable restrooms, we've got the right trucks,
we've got plenty of all that; but it takes more than all of that.
It takes the commitment of the people and I think
we get that, we understand that. Keith and his team do a great job
on the front end selling the special event services and making sure we have
the appropriate quantity
We have an array of experience in terms of knowing of how many restrooms there should be.
For X number of people, you know this window of time,
you really need this many portable restrooms. Our special events team is pretty
well
geared up for that. They're pretty knowledgeable in terms of making sure
that the event doesn't order too few.
Then it looks bad for the event and bad for us.
We look bad, even though we provided the number of restrooms
that they said. So it's got to be
a cooperative thing and I think that whole partnership thing is
what sets us apart from other companies.