Filling a special need

As earthmoving contractors go, he’s fairly small in a way but he’s got a mighty big heart, and to the special-needs kids of Otago he’s greater than Santa Claus.  HUGH DE LACY explains.

Greg Inch can’t even remember the names of the guys who gave him the idea 20 years ago.

They were a long-haul truck driver and his mate who worked out of Birmingham, England, on routes that commonly took them to Spain, up through the Balkans and back to the UK by way of Holland.

Theirs was one of only four rigs owned by a company whose home base backed onto an orphanage, and every time a truck returned from Europe the kids would help the drivers wash it.

As reward the kids were taken for a quick spin through the streets of Birmingham.

On the other side of the world, in Dunedin, the thrill those orphaned kids got from their truck-ride struck a chord with Greg Inch, a sole-trading rural earthmoving contractor who operates half a dozen machines and a few part-time drivers from a base in the suburb of Fairfield. There was, Inch was sure, a local application to the Birmingham drivers’ discovery that kids love trucks just as much as drivers do.

It took a couple of years of mulling over before, in 1991, Inch came up with his “Special Rigs for Special Kids” scheme of offering special-needs children and their families a ride in a truck. The concept was fleshed out over Inch’s kitchen table with a couple of local truck-drivers – Andy Willetts, who at the time was with NZ Post, and Glen Jacobs, who’s in heavy haulage with Fulton Hogan – who had got similar ideas from a schmaltzy old country-and-western ballad, “Teddy Bear”, by American truck-driving songster Red Sovine.

Special Rigs for Special Kids immediately attracted the enthusiastic support of caregivers, truck-drivers and contractors alike, and has today become the highlight of the year for hundreds of Otago kids otherwise dealt some of life’s harsher cards. And lately it has brought Greg Inch public recognition in the form of a Queen’s Service Order (QSO) award in the 2008 New Year’s Honours List.

Special Rigs for Special Kids operates with a minimum of organisation. Sometime about March each year Inch designates a Sunday in August that coincides with school holidays and the low part of the annual trucking demand cycle, yet avoids clashes with big local events like rugby matches.

Then he notifies a range of organisations from the Special Education Group to hospitals and district nurses, who in turn extend open invitations to the families of about 250 children with special needs to show up at the Toll NZ yard in Dunedin on the given day for a ride in a truck. The invitation to carry them goes out at the same time to transport and civil construction contractors throughout Otago, filtering through to others throughout the South Island and occasionally even the North.

The kids themselves range from the terminally ill and the blind to the variously disabled and the under-privileged, and Inch makes a special effort to cater for their siblings as well.

“If you’ve got a special-needs child in a family, they inadvertently tend to get a bit more attention and other kids feel a bit left out, so we make it a family day out and they’re all included,” Inch told Contractor.

Everyone shows up and registers on the designated morning. One registration desk is for kids and their families, the other for truck-drivers. They’re paired up on the spot with usually one child and one caregiver per truck.

Then they all mount up about 11am, forming the longest open-road convoy in Australasia, and go for a ride to some pre-selected destination in the environs of Dunedin for a barbecue lunch catering for up to 1200 people. Afterwards they mount up and are back at the Toll yard by about 2.30pm.

The 2007 event attracted no fewer than 233 trucks of all types, from tyre companies’ little six-wheelers to contractors’ stock and dump-trucks hastily spruced up for the day, to big long-haul road-rigs polished up in all their gleaming finery. A local bus company put on several coaches for the kids’ family members.

The Special Rigs for Special Kids convoy has the regulatory blessing of the Land Transport Safety Authority which grants the drivers full log-book accounting exemption.

The event has attracted about 150 sponsors and spun off into an evening shindig for the truck-drivers. The main role of the sponsors is to provide the food for the daytime barbie, but they also donate a raft of merchandising items like jackets, hats and vouchers for batteries. Drivers carry some items in their trucks to give to the kids. The rest are sorted into packages of two or three items to be auctioned off to the drivers at their evening party.

“A driver normally can’t afford a $180 jacket but if he can pick one up along with a hat and a bag or something for half that at the auction, he’s absolutely stoked,” Inch says.

Last year the auction raised about $7000 ($6000 in 2006), with half of it going to a charitable Driving Trust that Inch has set up to benefit truck-drivers.

A typical Driving Trust project followed the death of a Dunedin truck-driver in an accident south of Christchurch. The weekend before the accident the driver had taken the spouting off his house and was preparing to renew it. Word of this got to Inch, and on a Sunday shortly after the funeral he showed up unannounced at the house with his truck, digger and 15 volunteers. Inside three hours they had painted the bargeboards, installed the new spouting and downpipes out to the street, levelled and landscaped the front lawn and put up a new letterbox – all for a cost of about $300 to the trust.

“The boys were rapt and the widow was overwhelmed,” Inch says. “She realised how many friends her husband had in the industry, and it took one item of worry off her mind at a very difficult time.”

The other half of the auction funds goes to special needs kids. Last year Inch’s organisation gave $6000 to Air New Zealand’s Koro Care to fund a trip to Australia for a group of terminally ill children. Inch is currently setting up a deal with Otago Helicopters and the local helicopter rescue service providing comfort toys for the children they deal with.

Inch, who with partner Susan has two daughters of his own – Shannon, 8, and McKenzie, 2 – is from a North Canterbury farming family that later moved to Otago. Inch got into rural contracting at the tender age of 13 when he and his equally youthful mate, Wayne Flockton, leased an old truck and tractor from Flockton’s agricultural contractor father. Flockton drove the tractor, and Inch, in cheerful defiance of the age restrictions on open-road truck driving, carted up to 80,000 bales a year round the Taieri Plains.

After leaving school Inch did a horticultural course for a couple of years, but by the time he was 17 he was driving a D8 bulldozer in the Manuherikia, near Alexandra. With the benefit at last of a driver’s licence, he went from there back into trucks with Island Holdings. That company was subsequently taken over by TW Burlings, who had him driving stock-trucks and a Mitsubishi MSO4M digger.

When Burlings went into receivership, Inch tried to buy the digger from the bank without a deposit. The bank demurred, but lending manager Rob Nicholson of NatWest Finance took a plunge and lent Inch the full $35,000 purchase price, albeit at the massive  late-1980s market interest rate of 27 percent. Inch also acquired an old TS3 Commer truck on the promise to pay for it “at the end of the month” – which he did – and he was in business as Greg Inch Earthmoving.

Today he’s got three trucks, and his machinery inventory includes a 10 tonne Komatsu and a 5.5 tonne IHI digger, an 80hp Positrac loader and a Komatsu D21A bulldozer.

His small business and intensely loyal client-base hardly raise a blip on the wider business screen, but to the special-needs kids of Otago he’s a giant figure, and riding in his monster convoy that Sunday in August is an experience they never forget.