It doesn't happen often, but I always enjoy when I spot oversize equipment making its way across the roads. Enormous construction equipment; wind turbine blades; partial buildings. The kind of stuff that requires multiple lanes, careful route planning, and lead & follow cars. Gives a little glimpse of the immense effort we put in to building, improving, and maintaining our society.
During covid shutdown a massive piece of industrial machinery was transported down our rural highway. It had like 10 lead and chase cars and a dozen state police. The actual item had 4 semis with 2 pushing and 2 pulling.
I still have no idea what it was, but it added some excitement to a very mundane April that year. I have to imagine it was a very opportunistic move, since most traffic was stopped for covid already.
If it wasn't obviously a wind turbine blade (or a rocket!), maybe it was a petroleum distillation column? Those are a common extra-oversized highway load.
So, the chains broke when doing an emergency braking and the load crushed the pick-up? I clearly see that the driver was at fault, but aren't loads also not supposed to easily escape their tie-downs?
Some loads like this one are so heavy that you just can't defeat their inertia, hence why you go slowly and have a large escort. It couldn't be stopped that quickly just due to the nature of the load.
At some point if you're getting behind the wheel of a vehicle on the road, you have some responsibility yourself. If you're not looking where you're going at all and drive into the path of a heavily-escorted million-plus-pound load and it ends up crushing you because of the sheer physics of the situation, that's on you. There's a hundred other more likely ways to kill yourself on the road if you're not looking where you're going, that don't involve such unusual cargo.
And also, from looking at the photos of the scene, it looks like the driver may have turned quickly to attempt to avoid the crash, and the load continued on of its own inertia and overturned the entire rig, which is an issue caused by top-heavy torque that doesn't care how tightly the load is tied down at all.
Careful with that website. I am trying to access it from EU.
"We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact webadmin@tdtnews.com or call 254-778-4444."
GDPR is just a pain in the ass to implement properly, for some US websites it's just much easier to ban people from the EU from accessing it then risk the potentially massive fines
You also have to have a European GDPR representative, plus legal review to make sure you’re in compliance. It’s not hard, and not necessarily a large cost, but I can see it being judged “not worth it” for a small concern.
Exactly this. I've seen many EU folk assume if a site doesn't bother with GDPR it must be malicious. When really it's just easier to avoid the EU since they decided they think their laws can apply worldwide.
> What happens btw if an American company just ignores GDPR but still welcomes European visitors? Why would they care about EU law?
EU claims EU law applies to US sites if a EU citizen visits it. This has yet to be tested in court though. I'm incredibly skeptical that it can be enforced.
There's not really too much need for caution; they are just saying the GDPR doesn't apply to them and they would rather not deal with any issues. I do the same thing with many sites I manage, it's significantly less potential hassle.
This happens semi-regularly with links posted on HN. I always read it only as US websites who don't give a crap about the only domain where the EU is leading: countless regulation.
They just don't want to bother with the PITA that the GDPR is and just give that failing continent that my EU is the middle finger.
not sure about the distillation column but wind turbine blades and rockets are relatively light and don't need multiple vehicles pushing and pulling to move them.
Prince Edward Island is connected to the mainland with a two-lane 13.6 km bridge. There are designated times over the course of the day when the bridge is closed to traffic and oversized loads are transferred across.
Several deliveries are usually staged one after the other, so you get to see a variety of loads if you are unlucky enough to have to wait for 30-40 minutes. Most of the time, it’s pre-fab buildings and nothing too exciting.
There is redundancy in the form of a 90 minute Ro-Ro ferry route to the east, as well as mothballed docks near the bridge in case of an incident that closes the bridge completely. I’m not sure about the capacity for oversized loads on the ferry, but it’s often used by trucks to carry gravel and aggregate for construction.
more of a cost vs benefit tradeoff than a failure. It could also be just a SPOF for over-sized loads, whereas people have multiple routes on/off island.
My wife didn’t realize it at the time, but she got to see the Space Shuttles SRBs on the freeway as they were coming into LA for the Shuttle exhibit there.
Searching for when they moved Endeavor from LAX to the museum years ago is worthwhile. That was a tight fit on LA streets.
The original display at the California Science Center, the one they are currently replacing, had the shuttle in a large room, and about 9-10 feet off the ground. You might have been able to touch it if you jumped up.
It was a very intimate encounter with the shuttle. It's big enough to be amazing, small enough to be comprehensible in human scale. I was really quite awestruck being in its presence.
(Did you know all of the heat tiles has serial numbers? In hindsight, "of course the did", they were probably all unique in their shape. But it was one of those things you discover when your nose is 4 feet away from the bottom of the craft.)
That said, I can hardly wait for the new display, with the shuttle in launch form, mounted on the external tank with the SRBs. Seeing the designs they have, you'll actually still have a "close encounter" with this craft, despite its size. The rear of the shuttle will be quite close to the ground. It's going to be, I think, a very exciting exhibit.
I agree - they've recently repositioned it vertically (as it would be launched). I was at the museum a few weeks ago and it is definitely smaller than you'd think.
One time when I was flying out of DC, I got to see a space shuttle on the airport tarmac. (I can't remember if it was mounted on a 747 or not.) A very cool surprise.
This was probably in the 2009-2013 timeframe, IIRC.
The California Science Center has a little projector room showing a timelapse of the Endeavor being delivered to its final resting spot, right before you get to the big room with the shuttle.
For anyone interested in simulating such a drive, American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator both have DLC ("Special Transport") with trucks pulling massive payloads. Lead & follow vehicles. Plus a police escort. Mostly fun and a little frustrating. The latter due to not-always-great AI on the lead vehicles / police escorts
driving the follow car seems like an interesting job. they have to predict drivers and strategically position themself to redirect the herd. a diesel sheepdog.
Most jobs are probably super interesting for a month or three. Even the simplest of jobs assume you won't be productive immediately, which implies there's probably something fun to learn.
I used to do a number of those odd tasks (jackhammering down bank safes in preparation for the new tenants, ordinary pizza delivery, engineering a track for people to ramp/jump their mid-90s shit-mobiles, ...). I'm in tech as an ML engineer or something now, but one of these years I think it'd be a ton of fun to sit down and intentionally experience a hundred or so jobs and get a feel for what other people do for their livelihoods -- ideally in many distinct locales (e.g., where I grew up it was common for people to rent/(buy-with-intent-to-resell) a gas-powered bandsaw mill and produce most of the raw materials for their house, partly because land was cheap, partly because wages were piss-poor, and partly because there was a strong "make-do" attitude where people were willing to work hard to make a nice life with whatever hand they were given -- the sorts of jobs you'll have access to there are very different than those even a few hours away, much less a few states or countries).
That was a bit of a minor rant. I'm in strong agreement though; that sounds like a super interesting job.
I remember one wind turbine blade transport in small country roads in Finland, first car was basically driving on oncoming traffic side and forced me to go as close to ditch as possible, but it was good because the truck and trailer barely fit past my car.
* there are oversized load spotters like those folks with a hobby of keeping track of aircraft or trains?
* there is economic intelligence value in extracting and surfacing data from oversize load permits?
I'd guess that there's not a lot of stock trading value in tracking oversize load permits. I think most publicly traded companies announce large capital investments like new factories long before trucks hit the road.
Maybe so. I'm aware of satellites used to measure oil tank utilization [0], so sometimes odd information is informative for a specific trading strategy even if it is not useful in general.
For the 2nd, perhaps in identifying critical routes which may be worth an extra bit of infrastructure funding for upkeep to allow such important loads to continue to transit without issue.
Then again, the need for permitting should mean that state DOT's are already aware.
I do hope Radia gets their WindRunner plane off the ground. It's designed for onshore wind renewable energy, to be a plane with colossal internal volume. But it's also designed to work on landing strips that are much shorter & crucially primitive iirc or at least much more basic, to radically expand access to where we might setup wind power.
I have high confidence such a plane would most likely end up being used for other tasks too, if created. Maybe it's not as absurdly expensive as I imagine, planning & coordinating these intense logistics routes, but being able to airship things to interesting destinations seems super compelling to me, seems like it could enable a lot of infrastructure development that's simplify infeasible right now.
Marching into fancifulness here, but with something as big as a fab, I could definitely picture an initial construction phase where a sizable fraction of the land is dedicated as runway to start, isn't developed, while big items are flown in. Sounds wild, but could be possible! The model Radia has is off-site construction, and it's not too too hard to imagine perhaps more than wind turbines might benefit from this model: maybe not just coolers and fabs, but perhaps even prefab building walls could benefit from this.
