It is easy to take things for granted living in a “developed” place. Chances are that where most of you live, if an excavator needed to be loaded onto a boat, there would be a crane to lift the excavator and place it gently down on the vessel. While we’re not sure where this was shot, clearly that was not an option and the results are scary and pretty dramatic to watch. As it turns out, driving your excavator onto a boat is not the best course of action unless your end goal is to sink the thing to Davy Jones’ locker where it will likely be found in a few thousand years after the oceans dry up and we’re all living on Mars.
To set the scene, we have a reasonably sized boat with a platform in the center where the excavator plans on sitting for transport. Where it is going we have no idea. A makeshift loading ramp has been built of dirt on the land. We’re guessing that the work was done with the very machine that is being loaded here. As the weight of the excavator begins to transfer to the boat, things immediately look bad. The thing starts to list badly and rather than back the machine off, the operator is urged ahead with disastrous results. There was one last instance for everyone to save their bacon here but once the machine got seemingly all of its weight on the boat the counterweight of the excavator was at such an angle that the only way was forward.
You can see some workers make a break for it earlier in the video. We’re guessing that they saw the boat take on some water. The rest stayed and had to swim for their lives. With the excavator operator at full throttle trying to climb and center his weight, the boat begins to fill with water and scuttles in mere seconds. You can actually see a guy kind of ride it straight down. As that was happening the excavator operator made a near heroic move to save his own ass. Spinning the dipper and buckets he planted it into the banking that had been used at the start of the loading process. The bad part is that the loose soil did not provide enough grip for the machine to hang there and it makes a sickening kind of back roll and rolls beneath the waterline, the bucket seemingly reaching out like a hand from the grave. Creepy!
We don’t think anyone got killed or hurt here during the accident. No telling what the hell happened once the boss found out about this mess.
That header photo is very disturbing!
It looks like a predatory underwater killer digger blindly searching for its next meal. But I guess the people of Chickenland are used to such things and carry on regardless.
Chickenland – listen to the voices and you’ll understand….
There’s yet another example of why it’s called “third world”….
Guy was good, had cojones and almost saved it!