On a Tuesday morning in September of 1992, Frank Donnelly stood at the edge of a swamp and watched his career sink into the mud. 3 days earlier, his company’s newest piece of equipment, a Caterpillar 375 excavator, $600,000 of hydraulic power, and computerized precision had broken through what the surveyors promised was solid ground.
The machine had dropped like a stone, its 60tonon weight punching through the thin crust of dried earth into the bottomless black muck beneath. Now the excavator sat in the swamp like a wounded dinosaur, buried to its cab, its yellow paint stre with mud, its tracks completely invisible beneath the surface. Every hour, it seemed to sink another inch.
Frank had tried everything. On the first day, he’d brought in two Caterpillar D8 bulldozers and chained them to the stuck machine. The bulldozers had pulled until their own tracks started to slip until the chains groaned and one of them snapped with a sound like a gunshot. The excavator hadn’t moved an inch.
On the second day, he’d called in a recovery company from De Moine. specialists in heavy equipment extraction. They’d brought a truck with a 50-tonon winch and anchored it to a concrete foundation half a mile away. The winch had screamed, the cable had stretched, and the anchor had ripped out of the ground. The excavator had sunk another 6 in.
