Giant Scary Machines

Hey kids! Since it's most likely that only my archaeologist friends have ever worked on a construction site, I thought I'd share a day in the life with you. Imagine the biggest tire you've ever seen. Now double it, and you have a tire that costs $8,000, is about 7 or 8 feet tall, can kill people if it bursts anywhere in their vicinity, and belongs to a large yellow monstrosity called a belly scraper. Um, they're big. Here are some other exciting scraper facts: A new one will cost you at least one million dollars--closer to 1.5 million according to the paleontology guy. They weigh 150 thousand pounds (that's 75 tons, kiddos, or about 25-30 really big pickup trucks). They typically carry a load of dirt weighing about 100 thousand pounds, making a fully loaded scraper weigh in at 250,000 pounds, or 125 tons. And I got to stand next to them while they chewed up huge swaths of earth just a few feet from me.

Actually, I'm very afraid of these things, which is healthy. I try to stand at least a scraper-width away from them so in the off chance that one tips over next to me, I won't get squashed. I also always make sure that I have an exit path--at one point today I was standing on a wedge of higher soil watching the scrapers make a cut right in front of me. There are also several dozers out there, too; these are especially big ones, and some of them have a giant toothy-rake thing on the back that looks sinister and lethal, like a grotesque mutant wasp with three giant metal stingers. They use these kind of like a plow, dragging them behind them to break up soil to make it easier to scrape up. So anyhow, I suddenly notice that one of these was driving up behind me, and not only that, if he had decided not to notice me I would have been sandwiched between the scrapers and him. I got the hell out of there first chance.

Here's what the scrapers do, so you can get a picture of it: they drive around in really big loosely circular runs, scraping up huge loads of dirt and redepositing them wherever they need more fill. In this way, they can totally rearrange the topography in a matter of days; leveling off hillsides and filling up low spots. It's crazy. Awe-inspiring and tragic all at once. Scrapers have two main parts, the cab/engine up front, which can swivel a full 180 degrees from the body, and the body/trailer part. This part is especially cool looking--I find myself frequently in the conundrum of being horrified by the destruction being wrought by these things while at the same time admiring the techy-gadgety amazingness of them: like Tonka trucks grown up. The back end contains a large empty trailer that can be hydraulically raised and lowered, with the wheels on the very back end behind it. It also has a shovel-shaped bottom edge, and a large "door" that can move up and down on the front of it. When they are scraping, they lower the trailer bed part down to ground level and lift up the door, so it can scrape up all the dirt while they drive. When the trailer is full, they lower the door, lift up the trailer, and drive off to wherever they're dumping it, where they lift up the door again but without lowering the body, so the dirt falls out on the ground as they drive over it.

The ones out here are making fairly deep cuts, about a one- to two-foot cut at each pass. Because they're scooping up so much soil, they often need help, so they work in pairs. Their back ends have a huge trailer hitch-y thing above a large square plate, and the front ends have a humungous U-shaped bar that they can lower down, and a big metal plate on a spring, which is a sort of shock-absorber. The one in back lowers the bar down over the front one’s trailer hitch and scoots up real close until the metal plates bump together. It’s like some alien machine mating ritual. I wonder if the construction guys have ever thought about how sexual it all is, and if they have, do they suppress it because that’s just homo? Hmph! Now they’re all hooked up so that while the front one is scooping up dirt, the back one can help push--they would just bog down in the dirt otherwise. When the front one is full, he raises his trailer and pulls the back one as he loads up on dirt. It's like ballet! Only really stinky and noisy and without the tights and good-looking guys with huge leg muscles.

I really wanted to touch on some other things, but I’d like to end this on a somewhat positive note rather than go into all the death and destruction being caused out there by all this. I saved two snails today. I’ve got to save something! Just think about the stinky homo-machine dirt ballet. Tee hee!