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I was working on a pipe crew in 1998, we were installing a large concrete vault in a pretty big hole. I’m standing in a ditch about six feet deep marking grade while the excavator operator is digging. So to the front of me is a large excavator bucket, itself weighing hundreds of pounds and backed by powerful hydraulics and thousands of pounds of steel armature, and behind me is a solid concrete wall about a foot thick. And the ditch is only a few feet wide and too tall for me to jump or climb out of with any kind of speed.

Suddenly the excavator spins to one side and the arm snaps out to full extension with full force, and the operator shuts it down. The bucket missed my head by about a foot. He climbs out of the machine, visibly shaken, and tells me that something has failed on the machine and the arm “wasn’t supposed to have done that.”

So as he’s been digging he’s been noticing that ever so slightly there’s a bit of a delay between his inputs and the machine’s actions, and in the moment before failure he just felt “something wasn’t right” and tried to pull the bucket in; when it didn’t seem to want to, he turned the excavator “just in case” and that’s when the arm extended. Had he not, I would have been crushed to fucking death.

There were two other excavator operators on that crew, and they were basically idiots. Had one of them been with us that day, I’m sure I’d be dead.

luckygiraffe

h/t Reddit

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