[TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.

[Ries Niemi]

thats the best, or should I say, worst, steel delivery story I have ever heard.
I am glad you are ok, and that the driver didnt die, either.

I once had the 20' bobtail get stuck at my house at 4:30 on Friday afternoon, so they sent out the semi tractor from the steel yard to pull it out, and that got stuck. So, at about 8 that night, they got a semi-truck tow truck, a Peterbilt, and it had to tie off on a tree and yank first one, then the other truck out- but that was all on perfectly flat driveway, it was just a bit muddy...
the next spring I put down road cloth and about ten dump trucks full of pit run. Now I can drive my solid tire forklift out there and not get stuck.

ries

On Mar 8, 2013, at 7:18 AM, Andrew Vida wrote:

> 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.
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