Case Construction Equipment dealer Miller-Bradford & Risberg supported Team Rubicon’s second wave of response to severe storms that originally hit the area in July 2019, including five tornadoes, that caused severe damage across Langlade and Oconto Counties in northeast Wisconsin.
The severe storms and tornadoes uprooted or snapped tens of thousands of trees, devastating wide swaths of forest land. Areas sustaining significant damage included recreational areas such as ATV and snowmobile trails that are important to the tourism economy in the area — especially throughout the winter. During the 10-day operation, 76 Team Rubicon volunteers worked to clear dozens of miles of recreational trails, many of which were completely unpassable.
On some trails, including the Crocker Hills Glacier Trail in Lily, Wisconsin, trees and limbs formed walls across the trail taller than 20 feet. To clear the trails, Team
Rubicon sawyers partnered with heavy equipment teams that operated Case compact track loaders and excavators provided by Miller-Bradford. As the sawyer teams would cut trees into movable sizes, the Case CTLs and excavators pushed the debris to the side of the trail, making it passable and usable once again for ATVs and snowmobiles.
“We were keenly aware of the impacts that the storms and tornadoes had on the state and the communities that were hit,” said Dan Soley, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Miller-Bradford & Risberg. “We know the financial and long-term economic impacts that these natural disasters have on local communities – especially those dependent on tourism – so providing equipment for the clean-up efforts was our way of letting those people know that we have their backs.”
According to estimates, hundreds of thousands of trees were downed during the mid-July storms, which produced winds of greater than 100 miles-per-hour.
For more information or to donate to Team Rubicon, visit TeamRubiconUSA.org. For more information on the partnership between Case and Team Rubicon, visit CaseCE.com/TeamRubicon.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.