For a limb-loader operator, the months and years after a tornado are some of the busiest there can be.
Greg Morgan has worked in the Jacksonville Street Department for most of his 34 years with the City of Jacksonville, but it takes no time at all for him to recall the hardest work he’s done with the city: The time following the March 2018 tornado. As the main operator for the city’s limb loaders — trucks with big, hydraulic arms, sometimes called grapple trucks — it was his and the Street Department’s job to pick up the limbs and debris that blocked roadways, and later, the limbs and debris gathered by homeowners and set aside for pickup.
Even though it’s been about six years since the tornado, Morgan said that cleanup has only recently finished.
“Even after the contractors were gone, we had a lot to clean up,” Morgan recalled. “It really changed things for us.”
Morgan will have worked with the city for 35 years in August, the last 22 of those spent with the Street Department and operating the limb loader. His current machine, a Ramer 4500 (produced by one Ramer Manufacturing Company in the unincorporated community of Ramer, Alabama, incidentally), can lift about 5,000 pounds with its clamp-shaped grapple, and snap thick tree limbs like twigs. It operates a bit like those claw machines that eat kids’ money at arcades, though it’s easily more reliable.
He’s run the machine so long that it’s like an extension of himself. Asked last week how the Ramer’s joystick control system works, Morgan laughed — he could probably lift and park a small car with the loader arm, but it took a moment for him to reconstitute that motor memory into words.
“Everybody says it looks so easy, but I always tell them it’s a lot different when you’re in the seat,” Morgan said. He enjoys the work, though, even when residents put things in hard to reach places. “You’ve got to take it as a challenge; they’re testing my skills.”
He’s made close friendships with his coworkers over the years, Morgan added. Some have become like part of his family, he said, and he enjoys spending time with all of them.
When he’s not working, Morgan is an avid outdoorsman. He enjoys hunting, fishing, anything that puts him into nature, especially alongside his family, including wife Heidi, sons Gregory and Aubrey and daughter Hannah. He and Aubrey go hunting a lot, Morgan said, and Hannah runs a landscaping business he helps with, too.
Morgan is a Jacksonville native, descended from a grandfather who moved here from Griffin, Georgia, to take a job at the Profile Cotton Mill. He said the city has changed a lot during his lifetime, mostly from growth.
“When I was a kid, everybody knew everybody, but as it got bigger, it got a lot faster,” Morgan recalled.
