blake322•1mo agoMost Upvoted

Spent 4 hours trying to level a crawler crane on what I thought was solid ground

I was setting up a 50 ton Link-Belt on a job site in Tulsa last Tuesday. The ground looked flat and hard packed, so I dropped the outriggers and started leveling. But no matter what I did, the bubble kept drifting off by a quarter inch. After two hours of chasing it, I finally noticed a slow water seep under the mat. Turns out there was an old drainage pipe buried 3 feet down that was slowly washing the soil out. Had to move the whole rig 20 feet over to get on stable ground. Anybody else ever trust a site that looked fine and got burned by something underground?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow4071mo ago

Did you ever find out if the soil report for that site was any good? I had a similar thing happen in Dallas where a buried septic tank turned solid ground into a nightmare.

reesemoore1mo ago

Wait... a buried septic tank? How do you even miss something like that during the initial site check? That's just wild... I'd be worried about what else might be lurking underground out there. Around here we had a crew hit an old well casing nobody knew about, and it caved in half the foundation work they'd already done. Total disaster, cost a fortune to fix... I bet that Dallas job was a real headache from start to finish.