Gradall Industries, Inc., has introduced a Storm Recovery Series collection of machines designed to help municipalities, counties, and contractors handle multiple challenges in the wake of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other weather disasters.

Highway speed Gradall excavators can be driven over highways at 60 mph, without the need for a lowboy trailer, enabling them to get to disaster sites quickly and remove fallen trees and debris to create access for other emergency vehicles.

Once on a disaster site, and during the recovery process, the excavators can be equipped with a wide range of useful attachments including fixed-thumb grapples, tree limb shears, boom extensions, and buckets, enabling them to collect and load tree limbs and trunks, rocks, household debris, and building materials into trucks, as well as open drainage ditches and waterways.

Gradall models with highway speed undercarriages include the XL 3100V at 40,930 lbs. with a 27-foot, 3-inch boom reach; XL 4100V at 49,684 lbs. with a 30-foot, 3-inch boom reach; and XL 5100V at 57,670 lbs. with a 33-foot, 9-inch boom reach.

Gradall’s highway speed machine collection also includes Discovery Series models, developed in collaboration with Freightliner. The industry’s first crossover excavator models, with a Gradall upperstructure integrated into a Freightliner truck chassis, Discovery Series models are designed to fit into tight municipal equipment budgets. Two-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive Discovery Series models weigh from 32,200 to 34,500 lbs. and have a boom reach up to 24 feet, 11 inches.

All Gradall machines are equipped with a telescoping, fully tilting boom, enabling operators to correctly position attachments for faster debris removal. The low working profile boom design enables Gradalls to work under bridges and tree limbs, reaching into piles of debris and handling work that conventional knuckle boom excavators cannot.

Continuing Gradall’s one-man, one-machine productivity philosophy, each of the Storm Recovery Series models is designed for optimum versatility, including grading, excavating, ditching, and cleanup work, long after the impending threat of hurricane season damage subsides.