Yesterday the stars were aligned for a comedy of errors. On Monday afternoon we had the heavy equipment guys remove another tree that was located just off the main road through the middle of the base. The road is narrow and we're getting ready to pave it in the next few weeks and we want to widen the road. So, they brought the excavator out and dug a two-three foot hole on three sides of the tree. The tree removal went well, except for the excitement from the comm guys when they saw us digging in front of their building. We were digging close to the main fiber for the base. Our equipment guys told us they were not digging, they would just knock the tree over, so we did not do a dig permit to mark the utilities. Got lucky with that one. That's also when the luck ran out.
Monday evening it started to rain, it rained all night and then all morning. About 10:00 in the morning someone in the office asked us if we saw the Terex stuck in our hole. A Terex is a big crane type of vehicle that is used to lift the big conex's (shipping containers) and is one of the heaviest, if not the heaviest vehicle on base. The picture below shows it lifting one of the small containers on base.
The driver got a little close to the edge of the road when making a turn and just happened to do this at the same location where we had just removed the tree the day before. With all the rain overnight and in the morning the dirt we put back in the hole was like quick sand. You can see by the pictures below, it did not support the weight of the Terex.
It took a couple hours to figure out how to get it out of the hole and then to actually get it out of the hole. As you can see by the crowd in the picture below, this provided the entertainment for much of the base. First they tried hooking it up to a big tow truck, but they only spun the wheels, no moving it out. So, they called in the crane and lifted it up and out of the hole and got it on it's way.
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