With more than 45 years of experience working with tires, Donell Wilson was bound to come up with a better way to keep the yard hustlers at TOTE Maritime Alaska in Tacoma, Washington rolling. Hustlers are specialized vehicles that move and position shipping containers around the yard. His innovation is not only safer, but it’s estimated that it will save the company nearly $250,000 a year in damaged tires, and about $150,000 in lost productivity and maintenance time.
Talk to any Saltchuk Safety Award winner, and they’ll tell you: ensuring that everyone makes it home safely every day is everyone’s responsibility. Each year, Safety Award nominations come from across the Saltchuk family of companies, highlighting employees who go the extra mile for safety. We asked each of the dozen 2024 awardees to tell us something about themselves and why they like to play it safe on the job.
Getting to Know Donell
Q: Tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up?
“I grew up in Louisiana, back in the 1950s. I had an older brother, but he was out of the house before I grew up. So I was the only boy with seven girls in the house.”
Q: Tell us about your career, your current position and what led you to it.
Joining the U.S. Army in 1975, Wilson told the Army recruiter: “Send me as far away from Louisiana as you can.” He did basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, then advanced infantry training and Ranger School — widely acknowledged as one of the toughest courses in the Army — at Fort Benning (now renamed Fort Moore), Georgia. Eventually the Army sent him to Fort Lewis (since renamed Joint Base Lewis-McChord) near Tacoma.
“That’s how I go to this part of the country,” Wilson remembers. He does like to go back home once a year — “I miss the cooking.”
“When I got out of the military in the early 1980s, I went to work for Goodyear. Back then, it was the older guys teaching the younger guys. No talking, just listening. I learned mechanic work, and I was the tire guy there for 23 years. I learned how to do most anything.” It was through his union that he connected with a job with TOTE Maritime. He’s been there for 23 years: “Anything with wheels and tires on it — that’s me”
Donell’s Idea
Q: What was your idea, and how did you come up with it?
An experienced mechanic, Wilson was repeatedly fixing tires damaged by worn roll-out boxes — devices that bear containers on and off ships. He noticed that often, the roll-out mechanism had spread just wide enough to cut into tires on the hustlers used to move the containers in the yard.
His solution: place a half-inch spacer — a disc that fits over the axle and is designed to create a slight distance between the wheel and the tire — on the hustler rear tires.
As Safety Director Seth Storset noted in his nomination of Wilson for a safety award: “This allowed a wider stance and reduced tire damage, incidents and lost productivity.”
Wilson experimented, trying his idea out on a few vehicles and found that it worked well. Then, he says, “Seth came in. I told him about it and he got the ball rolling and started having them made. It took about a year to get all those spacers on.”
Wilson estimates that he’s gone from dealing with about 30 damaged tires a month, to perhaps five: And “sometimes we go a month without needing to change an inside tire.”
Q: How could the damaged tires affect safety?
“This is a safety problem because, if you go around a curve and the inside tire blows out, you’re going to flip the load.”
Safety to Donell
Q: How have you been able to do the job safely for so many years?
“To last a long time, the key thing is to warm up. I do exercises in the morning before I start. Out of more than 45 years working in the tire business, I’ve never been hurt on the job. I exercise every morning. I go to the gym in the morning and in the afternoon after work.”
Q: Speaking up for safety can be difficult for some people. What advice would you give someone within our family of companies who’s convinced their feedback won’t matter — or worse, that they’ll somehow be punished for taking action?
“I learned that every time you mention that something is not safe, something gets done. You’ve got to speak up for yourself if you want to live to see another day. If you think it isn’t safe, don’t do it. We all work together, me and the longshoreman down here. If they think something is wrong, they call me to make sure before they move it. They want my opinion on it.”
“I learned that every time you mention that something is not safe, something gets done. You’ve got to speak up for yourself if you want to live to see another day.”
