Heavy Equipment Fails… These Will Make Your Heart Drop!

There’s a funny thing about physics that a lot of people haven’t figured out yet: heavy equipment may let us harness physics and use the forces as play to our advantage, but that doesn’t change the rules of physics themselves. Machines like cranes and dozers make it possible for humans to accomplish tremendous tasks with the pull of a lever or the push of a button, but when we break the rules, things go south very quickly.

From the very first clip, this montage captures some of the most intense footage we’ve seen of heavy equipment fails, some of which could easily be fatal for the operators. From excavators falling off of their trailers – watch carefully to see the operator tumble out the door as the excavator crashes to the ground – to big rigs being hit by trains, there are all types of incidents in this group of clips. One of the most intense was watching a pair of cranes rescue a precariously oriented big rig that’s toppled over the side of a ledge. Just when it looks like they’ve got the trailer returned to vertical, the leverage of the crane cables swing the rig out over the chasm below. The weight of the rig swinging away from the weighted base of the crane was too much for the crane to handle, and the crane goes tumbling over the ledge.

The closing shot isn’t a fail, but is certainly one of the coolest clips we’ve seen that shows how amazing physics can be when things do go according to plan. With nothing more than a few small cables supporting a massive concrete mixer truck across an open mine. Once it’s positioned above the vertical mine, the truck is lowered into the earth, dropping smoothly out of sight of the camera. The forces exerted on these cables and the pulleys lowering this rig into the mine have to be extraordinary, but when the rules of physics are followed, everything goes just fine.