The team
Charlie Hatler has worked at Pitstop Portables since his father, HK (Horace Kirby), hired him in 1983 at age 19. By 1993, Hatler bought half the company, and by 1998, he owned everything. Today, an office manager, Suzanne Brady, and a foreman, DeWayne Harris, assist him. Together they enable Pitstop Portables to service Chattanooga and a 50-mile radius. No matter how well Hatler and seven employees work together year-round, nothing tests their efficiency and camaraderie as much as Chattanooga’s nine-day Riverbend music festival along the historic Tennessee River in the city’s downtown. When counting advance work and post-event cleanup, Riverbend requires about four weeks of effort. During the event itself, it requires nearly round-the-clock work by the Pitstop team.
Company stats
Pitstop Portables keeps a diverse equipment inventory to accommodate everything from construction sites to special events. To service construction sites, Pitstop has about 560 portable restrooms, most of which are the Satellite Industries Tufway models, as well as some Synergy World Taurus units and about 50 from PolyPortables Inc. For special events, Pitstop taps into a VIP inventory of about 100 Synergy World Ultras; and six of its 20 handicap-accessible restrooms, including Synergy World World Care and Satellite Industries Liberty units. Pitstop also supplies Riverbend with six Satellite hand-wash stations and three hand-built diaper-changing units.
Pitstop has a fleet of six trucks to haul equipment to the Riverbend grounds, including the three vacuum trucks that service the units nightly. Hatler relies on Nissan United Diesel cabover trucks built out by Abernethy Welding & Repair Inc. with Masport Inc. pumps. Two of the trucks have 1,500-gallon steel tanks (1,200-gallon waste/300-gallon fresh) and the other with a 700-gallon steel tank (500-gallon waste/200-gallon fresh). Two of the trucks also carry 12-volt wash-down Burks pumps.
For hauling portable restrooms and other equipment, Hatler has a Nissan UD with a 20-foot flatbed that carries 12 units; a Ford F-550 flatbed that hauls up to six units; and a Chevrolet 2500 flatbed that can haul three units. In addition, the Pitstop fleet includes three trailers, one homemade and two from McKee Technologies Inc.
The main event
Riverbend — at the center of Chattanooga’s renaissance — began in 1981 as a five-night celebration to unite the community through music. The early-June festival soon outgrew its original site on a narrow walkway along the Tennessee River, increasing in size, length and influence. The success of Riverbend — and the city’s 20-year, $750 million Tennessee Riverpark Master Plan — helped Chattanooga revitalize its downtown, which includes the Tennessee Aquarium, IMAX Theatre, Creative Discovery Museum, riverboat tours and Chattanooga Lookouts baseball stadium.
Riverbend now features six large stages on sprawling grounds between the Market Street and Olgiati bridges. Nine-day attendance surpasses 650,000.
The job
Before Riverbend begins, the Pitstop Portables team has been on and off the festival grounds for about two weeks. First they supply and service two portable restrooms for setup crews working on the stages, grounds and grandstands. Then, about four days before Riverbend begins, Pitstop begins delivering and positioning 112 units. They complete the setup two days before Riverbend begins. When it ends, they move everything back to their facilities in one day, but then need about another 10 days to complete cleaning and repairs.
During Riverbend, Pitstop services and washes each unit daily. By doing so, Hatler and his crews reduce time needed to prepare their special event restrooms for smaller events following Riverbend. Pitstop Portables also provides disposable cardboard garbage bins with plastic liners for the festival, but distributing and collecting them is the city’s responsibility.
The festival’s fifth night features the “Bessie Smith Strut” party on nearby Martin Luther King Boulevard, which requires Hatler’s team to move 40 units, then return them to their original locations the next day.
By the numbers
The crew needs two days to position the approximately 100 restrooms, six handicap units and six wash stations to best accommodate Riverbend’s large crowds. They experimented with various layouts to reduce waiting lines during previous years, eventually deciding to evenly space the units in clusters of six to eight throughout the grounds. They also evenly space handicapped-accessible units among the clusters and set up a fenced VIP area.
By the end of each day, generally 8:30 or 9:30 p.m., a crowd of 65,000 to 80,000 will have walked the grounds. As each evening ends, police sweep the area to clear revelers so cleanup crews can begin work. After stocking and inspecting the three vacuum trucks for the night ahead, Hatler and two drivers arrive on the grounds around 11:30 p.m. and start servicing restrooms. The drivers of the two larger trucks pump the units, check and replace tissue and add chemicals. The driver of the smaller truck follows, washing down each unit and adding water to holding tanks. Crews also pump gray-water tanks from various office trailers on the grounds.
Each service truck must leave the grounds three times each night to dump loads, which requires a 10-minute run across the Tennessee River to a treatment plant. If all goes well, they complete each roundtrip run in about 30 minutes. Work wraps up about 4 a.m.
Practice makes perfect
One constant of the Riverbend job is that the first night is usually the longest for Hatler and the Pitstop crew. “The first night is always the worst because they usually bring in a big star to draw a large crowd and get things off with a bang,” Hatler said. “Plus, even though all three of us are experienced, we don’t have a rhythm down because we usually don’t use three pumpers on the same site. But we work as a team and we get better with practice.”
No matter how practiced they become, they soon encounter another Riverbend constant: fatigue. “Once you get past the first night, you think you’re getting used to it the next couple of days,” Hatler said. “By the middle few days, you’re starting to slow down. I come in around noon during Riverbend, but it’s hard to keep the company running all day and then working all night. From there we get more tired each day, but then it’s over and you start thinking about what you should do differently next year.”
Satisfying the customer
Hatler always analyzes the team’s performance to ensure his company remains part of Chattanooga’s biggest annual outdoor party. “Sure it’s a big job and it requires extra effort from everyone, but we have to work within the time frame that fits everyone at Riverbend, not just us,” he said. “The organizers know when they want us down there, and that’s the only way we can do it. We just have to finish that job and get our trucks back in here so they’re ready when the day shift comes in to run their routes. We knock on wood every day that nothing breaks down.”
