Episode Details

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. They are the driving force behind keeping a fleet of 276 Jordan School District school buses running safely and smoothly. It's National School Bus Safety Week, so we are going to take you to meet the mechanics. They are men and women who work behind the scenes under the hood, examining engines, testing brakes, inspecting tires, even repairing upholstery on some of the largest vehicles on the roadway. Find out how our amazing mechanics work day and night in some of the worst weather conditions to keep kids safe on the school bus.

We're here with Richard Birrell, the shop foreman here at Transportation, where maintenance is done on all of our school buses. Richard, thanks for taking some time.

Richard Birrell:
You're welcome. Thank you.

Anthony Godfrey:
This is one of the jobs where people say, ‘Hey, what do you guys do all summer?’ There's a ton of work to be done in the summer to prepare for the school year and close out the previous one. Tell me what your summers look like.

Richard Birrell:
Our summers are just playing catch up, and finishing up with their services. Right now we're in the middle of doing three engines, so we're doing complete overhauls on three of the buses right now. Spring jobs, break jobs, we're going through everything. We went through every bus this year to make sure everything's ready to go again.

Anthony Godfrey:
And there are a lot of safety requirements and expectations, timing of inspections and maintenance work.

Richard Birrell:
Yeah. We make sure all the safety is up on every vehicle here, if it's due for safety emissions or whatever. We've done our emissions this summer. We don't stop. We're busy all year long,

Anthony Godfrey:
So it's a lot of work. How many buses do we have in our fleet, would you say?

Richard Birrell:
274 as of right now.

Anthony Godfrey:
And we have a few of those that are natural gas vehicles, right?

Richard Birrell:
114 of them.

Anthony Godfrey:
Tell me about the maintenance of a natural gas vehicle versus a traditional engine.

Richard Birrell:
The only real difference is, they're basically the same engine, other than a natural gas has a set of spark plugs, so we have to do service on spark plugs. But other than that, turbochargers diesel is controlled by intake heat pressure and natural gas is controlled by gasoline, which would be a spark plug fire type situation. So the service on those is a little bit more, every 30,000 miles, but not bad.

Anthony Godfrey:
And how many people are there on your staff to maintain all those buses?

Richard Birrell:
We're nine right now.

Anthony Godfrey:
Nine of you?

Richard Birrell:
Nine of us.

Anthony Godfrey:
That is a large bus to employee ratio?

Richard Birrell:
Yes, we are one short of what we're supposed to have.

Anthony Godfrey:
Now is most of the work that you do maintenance, I assume, but there are some emergencies that happen as well?

Richard Birrell:
We do everything in this shop short of transmission work. We do body work, we do engines, we rebuild our own engines. We do frame up, we do