[TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.

[Larry Brown]

Love it!

Next delivery set up cameras. Did they ever unload the steel or did they 
tow it away?

Larry Brown




At 10:18 AM 3/8/2013 -0500, you 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.