PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Routes & Dispatch

Rescheduling Porta Potty Routes for Weather Without Losing Track of a Stop

Weather is the one thing no route plan controls. Rain turns job site roads into mud. Ice makes a loaded pump truck dangerous. A summer storm shuts down an event. Heat makes units need more service, not less. The previous article, Emergency Pump-Outs: Dispatching the Call That Can't Wait Until Tomorrow, dealt with one urgent stop. This one deals with a whole route that cannot run as planned.

Decide Early

The worst weather decision is the one made at 9am with trucks already out. Watch the forecast the afternoon before, and decide by early morning whether a route runs, runs short, or moves. Drivers deserve to know before they come in, and customers deserve to know before they expect the truck.

Some guidelines many companies use:

• Light rain: run the route, but skip sites with dirt roads the truck could get stuck on.
• Heavy rain or flooding: pull routes in low areas, keep paved and city routes running.
• Ice or snow: run only what is safe, starting with critical sites.
• Lightning or high wind: hold trucks until it passes, especially for crane or high-rise units.

Your rules will depend on your area, your trucks and your drivers. Write them down so the decision does not depend on who is in the office.

Move Stops to a Specific Day

When a route has to move, move every stop to a specific day on the dispatch board. Do not leave them in a pile to sort out later. The jobs are on the board by day on a week strip and can be filtered by truck, so you can look at the next few days and see where the stops fit.

Often the cleanest option is to slide the whole route forward one day and push the rest of the week's routes along with it, or to split the rained-out stops across the next two days of the same truck. Keep sites on their area's truck wherever possible so drivers are not suddenly running unfamiliar stops.

Decide Which Stops Cannot Wait

Not every stop on a rained-out route is equal. A construction site with a big crew and units that were already close to full cannot wait two days. A seasonal park unit that sees a handful of users a week can. Before moving a route, sort the stops: the few that must happen today or tomorrow, and the rest that can slide. Put the urgent ones on the first truck that can safely reach them, even if that truck belongs to another area.

The unit details on each job help with that sort. A site with ten units and a hand wash station is a bigger problem to leave than a single Standard unit at a quiet farm.

Let the Map Catch What You Miss

Weather weeks are when stops fall through the cracks. A route gets half-done, the rest gets moved, and one or two stops never make it onto any day. The Waiting List helps here: stops that are due and not scheduled still show on the map, and a stop past a 7-day grace turns overdue. A quick look for overdue pins after a storm week catches what slipped.

Keep Customers in the Loop

Customers on a moved route need to know. Construction sites in particular plan around service. Two-way texting from the office lets you send a short message to affected customers and handle their replies in one place. On the new day, customers who use alerts get their night-before text and the usual on-the-way and arrived texts from the driver app.

Heat Waves Are Weather Too

Not all weather slows you down. Heat and big crowds make units fill faster and smell worse. During a heat wave, consider pulling some service visits forward a day or adding extra visits at busy sites. Those extra visits go on the Waiting List as jobs, and the extra pump-outs can be billed like any other.

After the Storm

Storms knock units over and move them. After high wind, expect calls about tipped units. The driver can document the damage with photos and notes from the driver app at each stop, and the office has a record if the customer has questions. If units were moved by the wind or by site crews, update the placement notes so the next driver finds them.

Learn From Each Weather Event

After every weather disruption, look back. How long did it take to get every route back on schedule? Which sites were overdue afterward? Were customers informed? Each storm is practice for the next one.

It is also worth checking the service frequency on sites that always seem to need help after bad weather. A site that floods every time it rains might need units placed on higher ground, and that is a placement note and a conversation with the customer, not a routing problem. The Porta Potty Dispatcher's Daily Checklist: Morning, Midday and Close includes a weather check that turns this into a daily habit.

For how weather rescheduling fits with route planning and dispatch overall, see PortaPottyBossPro portable toilet route software.