Mining is not an easy business. It is like the world’s biggest game of sand box Tonka trucks and like in the sand box, sometimes things happen. In this case an operator rolled a Caterpillar D11 bulldozer down an embankment, leaving it in a weird and tough spot to rescue it from. As you will see the thing was also sitting upside down so just dragging it out with other machines was not really an option. Enter the mighty dragline.
The dragline is the biggest machine in the mining arsenal. The size of a building on tracks and supporting a boom that is hundreds and hundreds of feet long, these machines work day and nice, pulling a massive bucket along to remove material that is then loaded into trucks for processing. It is nearly impossible to understand the size of these machines until you see one with a quarter million pound bulldozer hanging from it like a Hot Wheels car.
Yes, a Caterpillar D11 as configured here comes in at around 220-230,000lbs and yes, this thing grabbed it and put it down again like a load of bread. The ROPS and the soft nature of its landing spot seems to have spared the dozer from any massive damage and we hope the operator was OK.
Behold the mightiness and size of the dragline. Just look at the photo of the bucker next to the overturned dozer and you know exactly what you are dealing with here. Monstrous!
Check out these photos and remember that the D11 weighs a quarter million pounds!
aka the world’s most expensive tow truck…