Page 23 - PCCAJournal3rdQuarter2011

or 15 years, the University of Missouri in Columbia (UM) has been the valued client of Sellenriek Construction Inc., a 30-year-old Jonesburg, Mo.,-based company that specializes in telecommunication and electrical distribution construction. Over the past few years, Sellenriek has been the contractor for this leading public research university’s critical long-term project to expand its state-of-the-art telecommuni-cation infrastructure.

The bustling university is the largest in Missouri with more than 30,000 students and 12,000 employees. Founded in 1839, the 1,372-acre urban campus is located in walking distance to downtown Columbia, home to more than 100,000 residents in the heart of the Show Me State.

Sellenriek Construction has been connecting ﬁber optic cables between campus buildings with installments ranging anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 feet. Until fairly recently, the only way to get the job done was through intense manual labor, and the difﬁculty was compounded by ongoing chal-lenges.

One of the major challenges Sellenriek Construction faced is commonplace in today’s ﬁber optic industry: old conduit. Much of the existing conduit is made of clay tile dating back to when Model T-s were cruising around campus. Tiles not already broken or ﬁlled with mud had to be carefully handled because they are easily damaged. Caution also had to be paid

to any cable that was already occupying the duct, such as sensitive copper cable.

Consider the backbreaking job of hand rodding with work-ers manually forcing the cable through the conduit, and one can imagine the cost associated with this slow, arduous pro-cess. The exhausting work required larger crews to allow the workers to rotate. The work also had the potential for costly injury claims and lost man-hours. Though Sellenriek Con-struction had so far been fortunate, with several more years remaining on the project there was always the lurking threat of injury due to the tough, repetitive nature of the work. Sellenriek Construction Vice President Steve Sellenriek ﬁrst saw the Powered Duct Rod Pusher at the 2009 PCCA Conven-tion with his father Bob, founder of their family-owned busi-ness. Both were intrigued with the notion of replacing brute manpower with a machine, albeit an unassuming one just a little larger than a standard gas grill.