Brutal tractor accident

Parkanzky · Apr 10, 2015

A friend of mine grew up on a potato farm. He told me that one day he was in the cab-over dump truck pulling a broken-down semi down the road with a logging chain. He was looking in the driver's side mirror when the chain snapped. It took the mirror off the side of the truck, wrecked some of the cab at the back, and blew a big hole in the front fender. The story has always made me wary of cables/chains under tension.

I was always told to toss a floor mat or heavy rug or something over the middle of tow straps and such. With a cable under that much tension, you'd have to hook something really heavy on the middle.

DT86 · Apr 10, 2015

I've told this before but it's worth telling again...

A couple of years ago a well respected local man was pulling some trees/stumps/whatever, possibly cleaning up a fence row, on his farm with a bulldozer. He was working alone on this particular day. After some time the family decided he should've been back home already and went to see what was going on. I don't remember all the details but what ever he had been using to pull the trees had failed and snapped back into the operator area. Sadly, those were the last trees he ever got to pull.

Happy Gilmore · Apr 10, 2015

Parkanzky said:
A friend of mine grew up on a potato farm. He told me that one day he was in the cab-over dump truck pulling a broken-down semi down the road with a logging chain. He was looking in the driver's side mirror when the chain snapped. It took the mirror off the side of the truck, wrecked some of the cab at the back, and blew a big hole in the front fender. The story has always made me wary of cables/chains under tension.

I was always told to toss a floor mat or heavy rug or something over the middle of tow straps and such. With a cable under that much tension, you'd have to hook something really heavy on the middle.

I was always told to drape something similar to you, jackets or even towels will supposedly work too. I refuse to stand alongside a tight cable or chain under load.

DuckSlayer1017 · Apr 10, 2015

When I was a co-op the lab I was working in was doing some tensile tests on high tensile cable. The cable we were testing to failure was going to bring our very large tensile testing machine near its limit. All precautions were taken to keep shrapnel from flying out of the tester. When the cable broke at I think upwards of 200,000 lbs the cable slipped through the upper jaw and shot through the roof. Moral of the story is be very careful with stored energy, very bad things can happen when it is released.

Mace Canute · Apr 10, 2015

The first pic is not part of the accident; it's from here: WARNING! GRAPHIC! LiveLeak.com - When working on a Tipper... **Graphic** **Pics Only**

tcartwri · Apr 12, 2015

Good catch Mace.

Mace Canute · Apr 12, 2015

tcartwri said:
Good catch Mace.

It was pointed out in the myriad comments on Liveleak; I had nothing to do with the actual finding that it wasn't part of the original video and the video is important enough on it's own. It bugs me when some fool inserts non related information into anything.