Crane to the rescue as another excavator goes subterranean.
Seriously, how hard can it possibly be to walk around a site before you start work to check for hidden voids and basements that might ensnare your excavator? Apparently, very hard.
It seems that rarely a week goes by when, aided by an operator too lazy to check the lie of the land, an excavator goes Morlock and heads for the Earth’s core. And here is the latest instalment for the archives.
A 25-tonne hydraulic digger has fallen into an inspection pit at Whitehaven’s former bus depot.
Raymond Lawson of Lawsons Haulage and Crane Services at Cockermouth which supplied the crane used to haul the machine back onto terra firma, described the recovery as a “mammoth task”. “The track of the machine was wedged underneath the ledge of the pit, so we couldn’t just lift it straight up,” Lawson says. “We couldn’t get near it because the ground is mostly pits, so we couldn’t back right up to the machine and move it that way. We had to lift it using our crane and slinger and work with the driver of the machine who was also trying to move it. It was a big task and very tricky.”
The driver of the machine had been moving rubble on the site. It is believed he misjudged the width of the concrete floor and the pit and the vehicle fell sideways into the pit. The man was unhurt.
Read more here.
