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Urban Logger ■ Fitzgerald Excavating and Construction clears for residential development in congested metro areas. By David Abbott COVINGTON, Va. ere’s something you don’t see ★ everyday on most logging jobs: suburbanites jogging on a residential cul-de-sac sidewalk. The ones in this neighborhood have to jog around a knuckleboom loading a log truck on the side of the street. For Davey Fitzgerald, Jr. of Fitzgerald Excavating and Construction, Inc., it’s all part of the scenery. The company specializes in clearing timber, often for residential development, in the metro areas around Washington, DC, far east of its home base in
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Covington, Va. “They call me the urban logger,” Fitzgerald, 35, says of his peers in other parts of the state, who are accustomed to more rural settings. “When they come up here, the amount of traffic is what blows them away. The biggest question they ask me is how our trucks manage to haul in all this.” The answer to that question, of course, is “slowly.” The company’s drivers struggle to get two loads a day, with an average haul distance of 75-100 miles. Davey doesn’t mind. High production isn’t his primary concern. Fitzgerald gets paid for the job, not just for the fiber it hauls; that’s a
bonus. He asserts. “I am more worried about doing the job in the sequence it needs to be done.” The organization’s commitment to quality pays. In times when fewer jobs are available, Fitzgerald Excavating usually manages to stay busy. Davey says he still clears for the same companies under which he contracted when the family first brought its business to northern Virginia in 2004. “The project managers have told me that we are still on their job because we get it done,” he relates. “They don’t have to wait on us; we’re not full of excuses. We keep rolling somehow. We have a 13-year relationship with them because we do what we say we will do and we do a very good
Fitzgerald Excavating clears sites for residential development in metro areas.
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SEPTEMBER 2017 ● Southern Loggin’ Times
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job cleaning up. What we do and what we say, keeping a good name, keeping on schedule, has gotten me more repeat work than anything.” Davey is part of the family behind the company. His father, Dave, Sr., and mother Barbara, both 65, own the business. For the last three years, Dave, Sr. has settled in as a foreman/equipment operator, allowing his son to oversee the business side, a step in their long-term succession plan. The younger Fitzgerald says their company is one of the only land clearing outfits in the area actually marketing the timber it encounters, separating grade logs. Competitors simply chip everything, regardless of value. Property owners hire an