Over the course of 115 years, a company learns a thing or two about what works and doesn’t work for its business.
John J. Brennan Construction Co., a fourth-generation construction company in Shelton, Conn., has found success with Metso portable tracked crushers.
“The name of the game these days is to cut down on the amount trucks used,” said David Brennan, president and CEO of John J. Brennan Construction. “We want to bring as little material into the site as possible and we want to bring as little material out of the site as possible. The best scenario to accomplish this is to recycle materials from the old structures and infrastructure at various job sites and reuse that material to build new roads and to create fill items. Even within the site, the tracked crushers represent a savings to us. We are not moving truckloads of material from one end of the site to the other to process the material in the crusher. The crusher is mobile; we bring the crusher within the site to the material that needs to be processed, thus saving moving it around with loaders and trucks.”
The crusher Brennan is referring to is the Metso LT106, recently purchased from Whitney & Son.
A Long History
Brennan has been using Metso portable tracked crushers purchased from Whitney & Son since 1999, when the company purchased a Metso model 105. This was purchased at a time when Brennan as a company was making a commitment to recycling and material management.
“Our previous experience with Whitney & Son and the Metso machines was with our model LT 105 that we purchased back in 1999,” he said. “When we purchased that machine we did experience some challenges; however, we received the support and expertise that we needed to have from Whitney & Son to work our way through those challenges. Charlie at Whitney worked closely with Alan Thompson, Brennan’s superintendent of plant and material equipment at the time. Thompson has been with Brennan since 1980. The end result has been satisfaction on our part with the Metso products and the support from Whitney & Son.
“When it came time to purchase our new machine, we had a level of confidence in purchasing a Metso from Whitney & Son,” Brennan said.
No Rest at the Rest Area
Recently Brennan found that there was an increased demand to process asphalt into road base in the projects that it had bid for 2012. Among those projects is the construction of two new rest areas, one on the northbound side and one on the southbound side of Interstate 95 in Fairfield County, Conn.
There is a considerable amount of previously laid asphalt on the sites of the I-95 rest areas. These large volumes of asphalt needed to be dug up and processed into a road base. Part of this project for Brennan also included tearing down the old rest areas at the site and recycling the old structures and sidewalks and curbing around the facility for fill.
“Our need for processing material has increased greatly. On top of the I-95 rest areas, we are also involved in site preparation for the construction of two hospitals,” Brennan said.
John J. Brennan Construction
Brennan also has its own recycling center and gravel processing center in Shelton, Conn., so producing aggregate material is nothing new to the company. Howard Vagt, who started working with Brennan in the late 1970s as a laborer and has worked his way through the organization to being superintendent, has been heading up the material production and recycling side of John J. Brennan Construction Company.
“We are particularly proud of the long tenure of our employees. There are tremendous benefits to have 30-year veterans working side by side with 20 and 30-year old employees just entering the field. The result dramatically shortens the learning curve of new employees,” Brennan said.
In addition to the I-95 project, John J. Brennan Construction Company’s project history ranges from site work and heavy highway projects to detailed utility projects. It also provides pipeline construction, trench, paving and vacuum excavation services.
The company has won consecutive CCIA safety awards since 2002 and has qualified for the platinum level of safety. Brennan’s award winning safety program is guided by Joe Keane, a 30-year industry veteran.
For more information about John J. Brennan Construction, call 203/929-6314 or visit www.jjbrennan.com.
Whitney & Son
Whitney is a family-owned New England company. Founded in 1964 as Whitney Associates by Nason Whitney, Whitney & Son’s first office was in an upstairs bedroom in Lexington, Mass. Today, its 5-acre Fitchburg facility boasts three buildings and 38,000 sq. ft. under roof.
For more information about Whitney & Son, call 978/343-6353 or visit www.whitneyandson.com.
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