Fleets of bulldozers, dump trucks and excavators around metro Atlanta are turning into rusting 50,000-pound paperweights — symbols of a development boom that has gone cricket quiet.

Parked on lots for months on end, the heavy equipment is slowly rotting.

Vino Wong/AJC (ENLARGE)

Fleets of heavy equipments like these excavators are unused at Nasser Heavy Equipment in Lawrenceville Thursday, June 5, 2008.

Vino Wong/AJC (ENLARGE)

Nasser Alanssi, owner of Nasser Heavy Equipment, sits next to a fleet of tractor loaders that are unused since the middle of last year at his 10-acre lot facility in Lawrenceville Thursday, June 5, 2008.

Recent headlines: Gwinnett police nab more than a ton of pot  Budget shortfall may delay deportation of illegal immigrants  Paralyzed ex-husband may face murder case     • Gwinnett County news

Seals dry out. Batteries die. Fuel goes bad. Nasser al-Anssi said he rarely dealt with such problems before last year, when business at his equipment sales and rental company in Lawrenceville took a dive.

His main lot off Ga. 316 is awash in yellow, packed with equipment. Two years ago, three-fourths of the yard would have been empty. Compare that with a recent weekday. Just 35 of his 400 vehicles were rented out. Other grading-related companies face the same strains.

"It's ridiculous," al-Anssi said. "People are trying to make it from one day to the next."

A mechanic, he started the company a decade ago. "Whatever we made in 10 years of business we are losing in a year and a half," he said.

Once heavily in demand, equipment operators are struggling for work and jumping from mothballed residential development to shopping center, government and other commercial projects that are still pushing forward. Desperate grading companies are accepting rates that would have seemed absurd two years ago. And many dirt-movers are selling equipment or closing their shops, including a state senator who is shutting down the grading company he founded in 1984, laying off 89 employees and putting his 250-vehicle fleet up for auction later this month.

"It's unfortunate, but you really don't have any choice when the well runs dry," said Sen. Chip Pearson (R-Dawsonville), who is founder and CEO of Paramont Grading in Cumming and chairman of the state Senate's Economic Development Committee.

The company grew to 250 workers a few years back. Then a slowdown hit in 2005 and gradually worsened.

"We thought we might have hit a plateau last summer," Pearson said, "but obviously it got significantly worse. I don't know if anybody knows where the bottom is."

Home sales have fallen off steeply in Atlanta and across the nation as builders face a bumper crop of unsold houses. But there is even a bigger glut of already cleared and vacant subdivision lots. With nearly 150,000 such lots available locally, according to Metrostudy, there is no demand for grading crews to create more of them.

Ted Flanagan runs the Atlanta office of RentRite, a construction equipment rental business. Just two of his 59 bulldozers, dump trucks and loaders were rented out on a recent day.

"The phone doesn't ring from one day to the next," he said. "I'm betting on another year of this, at least."

Many customers owe him money, Flanagan said. "Half of my guys have gone out of business. More than half. We can't reach them by phone. I don't know where they are."

Even more sheltered parts of the industry are hurting. Seth Bible specializes in preparing sites for schools, a niche of construction that remains active. Yet in recent weeks his Dunwoody-based business laid off 15 employees and parked about a fourth of his fleet.

Job-hungry grading companies have jumped from harder-hit parts of the industry to his market, Bible said. In the past, he could expect to bid against about five other grading contractors for a job. Now, it's more like 25.

With so much competition, rates have tumbled. Contract prices for moving a cubic yard of dirt have plummeted from $2.50 to $1 or even 85 cents.

"You can't make nothing," said Bible, who is 62 and started in the business as a teen. Meanwhile, he said, daily fuel costs have spiked to more than $450 for a track loader — a particularly useful machine for digging out basements in Georgia's red clay.

Few buying equipment

The local market for selling heavy construction equipment has lost traction.

Statewide sales for the entire segment are 30 percent of what they were two years ago, said Jim Stephenson, the chief executive of Austell-based Yancey Bros., the Caterpillar dealer for Georgia.

His grading-company customers have become competitors, selling or renting used equipment to contractors who have work, Stephenson said. "Everybody is fighting like a son of a gun" to get business.

At the same time, auctions are overflowing with equipment that contractors are trying to unload.

Ritchie Bros., a Canadian firm that holds industrial equipment auctions around the world, has slated one for later this month in Atlanta.

Normally one-day events, all this year's regional auctions have been two-day affairs, said Darrin Hogeboom, a regional manager. "That's because there is a surplus of equipment."

Even with so much supply, there has been only "a slight decline" in equipment prices at the auctions, Hogeboom said.

Sellers would have a tougher time, he said, were it not for the growing number of international buyers trolling the United States for construction equipment that can be shipped back home to Australia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America. (But generally not booming China, Hogeboom said. "I'm not sure why.") About 25 percent of the auctioned equipment is exported, he said.

In Lawrenceville, equipment dealer al-Anssi has stepped up his own international selling, finding buyers in spots such as Russia, Dubai and Kenya. But it is just a small part of the business, he said, and many of the vehicles he still has have lost much of their resale value.

With so little work, he has found time to start a vegetable garden at home. But he wonders what's ahead for his business.

"My wife tells me I need to lay people off," he said. "I'm hoping the business will come back before we have to do that."