Some of our subcontractors at the Sellwood Bridge project have horns, hooves and a healthy appetite for brush. They prefer night work, take daily power naps together and never request time off.
That’s because they’re goats. No kidding.
The Slayden/Sundt joint-venture transportation project in Portland, Oregon, has had a commitment to green measures from the beginning. Having 60 goats working together to get rid of brush eliminated waste that would be generated by humans thinning the thicket by hand. The City of Portland asked the team to clear the trail on the east side of the Willamette River on the $228 million project.
The animals spent a couple of weeks onsite this month and are returning in the spring to eat blackberry vines.The goats are owned by Goat Power, a husband and wife venture who travel the Willamette Valley with their four-legged friends in a refurbished bus. The goats go from one job to the next, working months at a time.
But the bearded wonders won’t completely replace people on cleanup duty: human crews will still remove old vines and trim trees.