Slow, slow, slow

Oxbow – Asked how things are going, Trevor Spearing, of Extreme Excavating summed it up in one word: “Sucks.”

He then followed up with, “Slow, slow, slow.”

The Oxbow-based hydrovac company had built its fleet up to 12 trucks for a while. They’re now down to eight. “It would be four if we could get some money for them,” Spearing said.

They traded in three old units for one new one, downsizing but updating the fleet at the same time.

Being a hydrovac company, it’s very important to keep your fleet in a heated building. But now there are fewer trucks in it.

In 2015, he said they were alright. “We were alright until late November. It wasn’t busy. We had been busy until the end of April. But In June and July, no one does anything here in the patch anymore.”

That’s been a longstanding issues, with many oil companies shutting down operations in the early summer because of wet ground conditions that had persisted ever since the flood year of 2011. But 2015 was no flood year, and in fact it was one of the best years in recent memory for doing dirt work and drilling. The problem is, no one was spending much money due to the oil shock.

So the company started to downsize. Spearing explained, “Most of the East Coast folks went home. One Newfie has stuck it out. We had six to eight, from Ontario to Newfoundland. One Nova Scotian moved his family here, so I consider him local now.”

He’s also still working.

Lots of people in the business went home, he said…