[TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.

[Andrew Vida]

So I spend all this time excavating the crawl space beneath the house 
with nothing but a shovel and wheel barrow.  200 yards of impossible WV 
red shale clay.  The 2' crawl space is not 10' deep and almost ready for 
the new foundation wall.  I order about 1000' of rebar and a few other 
bits for the work ahead.

West Virginia Steel truck arrives yesterday and as it backs down our 
steep driveway the brakes apparently have issues and the truck just 
keeps rolling.  That length of 12" channel just kisses the house as the 
truck comes to a tenuous stop.  I chocked the wheels and the driver 
calls a wrecker.  An hour later the truck is halfway up the driveway, 
chocked and safe.

So what does the driver then do, you ask?  He proceeds to follow the 
wrecker up the driveway against instruction, stalls the engine on the 
GMC 7500 flatbed, which has no airbrakes, and proceeds rolling back to 
the house.

I am standing directly behind about 50' back thinking that this just 
cannot be happening.  I dodged being hit by about 8 to 12 inches.  The 
truck plows into the parked 4Runner, destroying the front end as the 
driver attempts to avoid leveling the house, veers off to the right, all 
this backwards, flies into the as-yet dry pond I excavated about 6 
months ago, the back slamming into the opposite embankment and 
decelerating the vehicle from about 35 or 40 mph to zero in well under 
1/10 of a second.  The front wheels flew at least 2' off the ground as 
the entire chassis bent in ways never intended, the remaining energy 
directing the cab rightward about 15 feet.

I was certain the driver had been killed, but he survived, if with a 
goodly showing of his own blood as his head went through the back 
window.  That the steel was not driven through the cab and subsequently 
through the driver seems convincing evidence that someone was watching 
over him.

A small fleet of wreckers showed up and in about 6 hours they actually 
managed to themselves get stuck in the mud, but eventually got 
themselves and the delivery vehicle out.

So my driveway is damaged from the steel chocks scraping as the wreckers 
skidded under the stress of the cables, one of which broke 
unceremoniously - nobody killed by the whipping cable, but I was 
standing only about 40 feet away, thereafter increasing my interval of 
observation.

Garden nuked, car nuked, potato bed nuked, tillable ground seriously 
nuked.  House slightly damaged.

All in all, the day seemed pretty to have passed well.  Nobody killed.