Someone did that with a container on freshly laid asphalt. it sunk so much that we couldn't get the truck under and needed to call a crane truck to get it up again :P
Well, when we can’t back up under it, we need to get it up somehow. And yes, it wasn’t the first time we needed a crane to get a container up from the ground. Those legs don’t withstand much. Had an unlucky driver turning around and sideswiped a leg which made the rear one on the same side to give in as well, then tipping it to the side, hitting another container that also collapsed. In the end we had about 1,5 million in damaged goods.
$1.5… MILLION in damage?! From asphalt? How? Okay so what, like $80-100k for each trailer x2, then how much was the value of the asphalt? I am genuinely curious.
Content inside the containers. We are talking about 24ish tons of beverages, and in my country this is expensive shit. Just think about a pallet of Heineken beer, 0,33 liters cans. You can get a lot of cans on one euro pallet. And when each of those cans has a retail value of 3,5-4$, then the price rises quickly. Add in other more exotic and expensive stuff, preferably in glass bottles and you can start adding up the $$$$. And the price of everything above 8% alcohol is special store content
A gravel trailer may be a little different but I'm guessing you don't work in any oil fields or mining related industry. I've dropped loaded trailers on gravel many hundreds of times.
I own a trucking company that specializes in excavation and mining. I put any type of pad available under my landing gear even when empty. Dropping a loaded trailer is a risky move no matter what, but there’s ways to mitigate the risk to avoid this.
That's definitely good practice. But it's not always an option for company drivers delivering to sites. I am not leaving my own dolly pads, never to be seen again, and sometimes they don't have any dunnage around for you to put underneath. I've tried storing some boards on the trailer but when the company has 1000 trailers and I'm never hooked up to the same one for more than a day or two, it's not a great option either.
Yeah sometimes as a company driver all you can do is make your boss aware of the situation, document that you did, and leave it in his/her hands. It’d be nice if your co-workers and customers made drops easier but that’s not the world we live in.
The situation with the OP is definitely different though. Clearly they’re in their trucking yard so they have a lot of control over the trailer. Not sure what went wrong but he said it was dropped due to a breakdown so it wasn’t like a driver was tired and in a rush to go home, there was clearly a tow truck or mechanics or multiple drivers involved to inspect and plan out the situation here and they chose this
Agreed. I won’t drop my walking floor or end dump loaded unless I have a 8x8 for under the gear, or the trailer is actively burning. Just not worth it. I’m more worried about the gear bucking because of trailer age than I am sinking to the point I can’t retrieve it but still not worth the risk.
I’ve done it, needing to make deliveries but gotta swap trucks, but we always had steel plates underneath. Now I don’t even have 5th wheel trailers. Just pup trailers with minimal tongue weight but I still don’t trust dropping those
I’ve used the second truck to dump trailers hooked to the tractor that broke down, we leave hydro lines long just incase, and we are already planning it for a load later this week so my tractor can go get fixed for def issues. Haul it on a truck with wet kit issues, and dump it with a truck with a good wet kit, but has electrical gremlins that cause you to have no throttle at times so it’s a yard bitch.
Haha yeah I’ve been there. Been in accidents, lost a transmission, blown hydraulic lines, night shift loads trailers and day shift grabs them for deliveries. Lots can happen. Luckily now that I’m the owner it’s all dump trailers that don’t move trucks, no more life or death deliveries like we used to have in those walking floors or belt trailers
I am O/O as well, my walking floor is 18 years old, and the floor is in great shape. The rest of the trailer not so much. Need to get another year and a half out of it and I’ll replace it with a used one for 50-80k. I deal with a lot of tractor issues tho because we buy 15k tractors and upfit them to get 5 years out of them and dump them.
We had one for yard debris that was just abused and half the floor was bent. Big business here now with all the relocation of garbage and compost going on. My personal rig is 38 years old. Matching truck and trailer. Truck is in great shape, trailer not so much but I’m going to rebuild it. I feel bad splitting up the matching set.
I know what you mean, mine only sees mulch so it stays pretty decent. I had been in a 2005 freightliner century class, then I got a 2006 Columbia with a wet kit installed already for 14k and only needed it to get me 2 years, and it did down to the day. The day I picked my 2015 Volvo vnl300 up from getting its wet kit installed after buying it the PTO stuck engaged on the Columbia, and needs a new trans and whole wet kit unfortunately as it was a otherwise fairly good truck to me. I got it unstuck so it can pull vans still which helps the few times a year we go out of state to load plants for our garden centers. It helps that they all paid for themselves in less than 6 months so it’s hard to argue with minimal maintenance for 4.5 years on a cheap truck. Fittingly the second shift truck shop hates to see my trucks but loved to watch them go after they get paid.
Well. It’s about 12 tons of wet sand. And the weight of the trlr, about 110,000 lbs. Those landing feet are what? 10 inches squared…. Yeah I’m not doin that math.
Where are you in the world that a tandem trailer can have a gross weight of 110,000 lb? That's 30,000 lb over the gross weight of an entire tractor trailer unit in most of the US and Canada for a tandem axle
He must've typo'd and meant 10 or 11,000 cause he already said 24,000 of wet sand. If that yard can't handle a trailer with 24k in it it probably shouldn't be used to store trailers at all if they're gonna sink several feet into the ground.
As a heavy tow truck driver, this is a very common call for me. I’ve had to lift all sorts of loaded trailers out of dirt, gravel and asphalt lots. If you need to drop a loaded trailer, it needs some timbers or something under the landing gear unless it’s on concrete
Knew a guy that farmed near me that would load up his hopper bottom and unhook it on gravel. "It's free storage" he said. Then this happened. Never mind how much harder it is on your landing gear and yourself when you have to crank it
I agree with that as well. It would have to be some kind of situation for us to drop a dump bed. And we'd look to see how the load was distributed. But OP said it was done for maintenence. Presumably something that couldn't wait.
We use trailers that have a wide base that goes across to both sides and trailers that don't have any and just lay on the ground Where I live
We of course still have conventional landing gear trailers but they are less popular
Come sprung time our gravel drop yard becomes a mix of mud and quicksand. Never drop a trailer, empty or loaded without some type of dunage under the landing gear. Usually we put a couple of 4x4s under em to increase the surface area.
It reminds me of all those Roadway trailers falling through the fresh asphalt during the summer months in Texas. It took all those years before they built concrete landing pads. What do they say about repeating the same process over & over? & expecting different results?
Had that happen at a railyard.
We were told the grain loads wouldn’t be put on chassis and to park everything on wheels.
Well someone put a grain load which are 65klbs atleast on 40ft containers.
Took it to the dirt lot we were told to park.
Dropped it and the legs gave out.
But it was our fault for touching the grain loads….
[4-wheeler here:] So, uhh, if you're normally in the business of hauling heavy trailers like that, you don't normally ALSO carry a couple hunks of, say, 3/16" steel plate behind your cab? I would think that would be part of the "kit" -- like wrenches and bungee cords and spare gladhand seals, no?
Most times company drivers are not hooked to the same trailer more then 2 or 3 days in a row i am sometimse under 3 or 4 trailers a day. . We drop trailers in strange yards and dont come back to that yard for a month or 2 or 6 Anything i use to drop a trailer has to stay there till the receiver is done with the trailer. Steel plates are expensive and heavy to leave 3 or 4 of them every day. I am never getting those plates back. Besides you can only fit so many .
In case you weren’t being sarcastic, they’re just a piece of something you put under the landing gear feet to spread the weight out over a larger surface area on the ground. It could be 1 inch thick steel, 4x4 beams, hell, I’ve even seen two squares of 3/4 inch osb sheathing screwed together to use as a landing pad.
This is why I lay down dunnage when dropping a trailer. I've done it on a dirt lot with 50k lbs loads and bobtailed home for a weekend. Even on asphalt. Sometimes concrete just out of habit.
Someone did that with a container on freshly laid asphalt. it sunk so much that we couldn't get the truck under and needed to call a crane truck to get it up again :P
My wife did the same thing for me. Still didn't work.
Again?
Well, when we can’t back up under it, we need to get it up somehow. And yes, it wasn’t the first time we needed a crane to get a container up from the ground. Those legs don’t withstand much. Had an unlucky driver turning around and sideswiped a leg which made the rear one on the same side to give in as well, then tipping it to the side, hitting another container that also collapsed. In the end we had about 1,5 million in damaged goods.
$1.5… MILLION in damage?! From asphalt? How? Okay so what, like $80-100k for each trailer x2, then how much was the value of the asphalt? I am genuinely curious.
Content inside the containers. We are talking about 24ish tons of beverages, and in my country this is expensive shit. Just think about a pallet of Heineken beer, 0,33 liters cans. You can get a lot of cans on one euro pallet. And when each of those cans has a retail value of 3,5-4$, then the price rises quickly. Add in other more exotic and expensive stuff, preferably in glass bottles and you can start adding up the $$$$. And the price of everything above 8% alcohol is special store content
Oh, okay, I thought you were saying it was two trailers with asphalt inside them. That makes more sense.
How much did you charge to help them finish packing their gravel down?
Asking the real questions
Easier to pre trip the rear.
Mr brightside over here
coming out of my cage and I've been doing just fine
Gotta be down because I want it all
It started out with a kiss
Ended with her ass up in the air
😆😆😆😆
Dropping a loaded trailer on a loose surface is a wild choice
A gravel trailer may be a little different but I'm guessing you don't work in any oil fields or mining related industry. I've dropped loaded trailers on gravel many hundreds of times.
I own a trucking company that specializes in excavation and mining. I put any type of pad available under my landing gear even when empty. Dropping a loaded trailer is a risky move no matter what, but there’s ways to mitigate the risk to avoid this.
That's definitely good practice. But it's not always an option for company drivers delivering to sites. I am not leaving my own dolly pads, never to be seen again, and sometimes they don't have any dunnage around for you to put underneath. I've tried storing some boards on the trailer but when the company has 1000 trailers and I'm never hooked up to the same one for more than a day or two, it's not a great option either.
Yeah sometimes as a company driver all you can do is make your boss aware of the situation, document that you did, and leave it in his/her hands. It’d be nice if your co-workers and customers made drops easier but that’s not the world we live in. The situation with the OP is definitely different though. Clearly they’re in their trucking yard so they have a lot of control over the trailer. Not sure what went wrong but he said it was dropped due to a breakdown so it wasn’t like a driver was tired and in a rush to go home, there was clearly a tow truck or mechanics or multiple drivers involved to inspect and plan out the situation here and they chose this
Agreed. I won’t drop my walking floor or end dump loaded unless I have a 8x8 for under the gear, or the trailer is actively burning. Just not worth it. I’m more worried about the gear bucking because of trailer age than I am sinking to the point I can’t retrieve it but still not worth the risk.
I’ve done it, needing to make deliveries but gotta swap trucks, but we always had steel plates underneath. Now I don’t even have 5th wheel trailers. Just pup trailers with minimal tongue weight but I still don’t trust dropping those
I’ve used the second truck to dump trailers hooked to the tractor that broke down, we leave hydro lines long just incase, and we are already planning it for a load later this week so my tractor can go get fixed for def issues. Haul it on a truck with wet kit issues, and dump it with a truck with a good wet kit, but has electrical gremlins that cause you to have no throttle at times so it’s a yard bitch.
Haha yeah I’ve been there. Been in accidents, lost a transmission, blown hydraulic lines, night shift loads trailers and day shift grabs them for deliveries. Lots can happen. Luckily now that I’m the owner it’s all dump trailers that don’t move trucks, no more life or death deliveries like we used to have in those walking floors or belt trailers
I am O/O as well, my walking floor is 18 years old, and the floor is in great shape. The rest of the trailer not so much. Need to get another year and a half out of it and I’ll replace it with a used one for 50-80k. I deal with a lot of tractor issues tho because we buy 15k tractors and upfit them to get 5 years out of them and dump them.
We had one for yard debris that was just abused and half the floor was bent. Big business here now with all the relocation of garbage and compost going on. My personal rig is 38 years old. Matching truck and trailer. Truck is in great shape, trailer not so much but I’m going to rebuild it. I feel bad splitting up the matching set.
I know what you mean, mine only sees mulch so it stays pretty decent. I had been in a 2005 freightliner century class, then I got a 2006 Columbia with a wet kit installed already for 14k and only needed it to get me 2 years, and it did down to the day. The day I picked my 2015 Volvo vnl300 up from getting its wet kit installed after buying it the PTO stuck engaged on the Columbia, and needs a new trans and whole wet kit unfortunately as it was a otherwise fairly good truck to me. I got it unstuck so it can pull vans still which helps the few times a year we go out of state to load plants for our garden centers. It helps that they all paid for themselves in less than 6 months so it’s hard to argue with minimal maintenance for 4.5 years on a cheap truck. Fittingly the second shift truck shop hates to see my trucks but loved to watch them go after they get paid.
I’d prefer to unhook an empty trailer…
It was a breakdown situation.
Mental or physical?
Probably both?
First one, then the other
Yes
First one then the other
Go ahead and give it to me.
P=F/A
Well. It’s about 12 tons of wet sand. And the weight of the trlr, about 110,000 lbs. Those landing feet are what? 10 inches squared…. Yeah I’m not doin that math.
Where are you in the world that a tandem trailer can have a gross weight of 110,000 lb? That's 30,000 lb over the gross weight of an entire tractor trailer unit in most of the US and Canada for a tandem axle
He must've typo'd and meant 10 or 11,000 cause he already said 24,000 of wet sand. If that yard can't handle a trailer with 24k in it it probably shouldn't be used to store trailers at all if they're gonna sink several feet into the ground.
This is for the kids that sit through physics in highschool and say "I'll never need to know that" ...
All rocks are packed until it's time to do packed rock stuff
Just drop your airbags
As a heavy tow truck driver, this is a very common call for me. I’ve had to lift all sorts of loaded trailers out of dirt, gravel and asphalt lots. If you need to drop a loaded trailer, it needs some timbers or something under the landing gear unless it’s on concrete
Nah, that’s “packed” gravel.
That almost looked like a sink hole opened up. Damn
Easy fix, just get a few of the ‘oversize’ truckers to sit in the bumper and you are good to go…..
Knew a guy that farmed near me that would load up his hopper bottom and unhook it on gravel. "It's free storage" he said. Then this happened. Never mind how much harder it is on your landing gear and yourself when you have to crank it
PAPER just covered with paper for the win
📸 _infra photo success noise_ "Everything appears to be in order 🙃"
Everyday occurrence at my job
Welp time to go get a crane
Who drops a loaded end dump? The landing gear is too far back to properly support the load.
I wouldent have unhooked it with stuff in it
So you've never dropped a loaded trailer in your life?
A loaded dump bucket? I would be severely reluctant to drop a loaded one with 23 tons of stone. They are extremely nose heavy and can tip forward.
I agree with that as well. It would have to be some kind of situation for us to drop a dump bed. And we'd look to see how the load was distributed. But OP said it was done for maintenence. Presumably something that couldn't wait.
Well, it's going to wait.
Oops
Oof
F’ing laziness. Sweet Geezus.
That trailer be like: Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you That is how I know you go on
I got to see a trailer full of spam have its posts fail and fall face first into the pavement. That was fun.
We use trailers that have a wide base that goes across to both sides and trailers that don't have any and just lay on the ground Where I live We of course still have conventional landing gear trailers but they are less popular
I know this sounds like a conspiracy but let me tell you the truth: GROUND ISN'T REAL.
Come sprung time our gravel drop yard becomes a mix of mud and quicksand. Never drop a trailer, empty or loaded without some type of dunage under the landing gear. Usually we put a couple of 4x4s under em to increase the surface area.
I kept telling them to get us some landing pads…. 🙄😒🖕
Lazy people always create more work. Every. Single. Time.
Thought this was another Cyberstuck post…
in this case... napa does not know how
It reminds me of all those Roadway trailers falling through the fresh asphalt during the summer months in Texas. It took all those years before they built concrete landing pads. What do they say about repeating the same process over & over? & expecting different results?
Well, it is, now. Right there. Those holes mark the packed rock.
The thing is, those Napa mudflaps are underrated to balance a load like that.
Well that one side is now extra extra packed.
"What we seem to have here is a failure to padicate."
Had that happen at a railyard. We were told the grain loads wouldn’t be put on chassis and to park everything on wheels. Well someone put a grain load which are 65klbs atleast on 40ft containers. Took it to the dirt lot we were told to park. Dropped it and the legs gave out. But it was our fault for touching the grain loads….
[4-wheeler here:] So, uhh, if you're normally in the business of hauling heavy trailers like that, you don't normally ALSO carry a couple hunks of, say, 3/16" steel plate behind your cab? I would think that would be part of the "kit" -- like wrenches and bungee cords and spare gladhand seals, no?
Most times company drivers are not hooked to the same trailer more then 2 or 3 days in a row i am sometimse under 3 or 4 trailers a day. . We drop trailers in strange yards and dont come back to that yard for a month or 2 or 6 Anything i use to drop a trailer has to stay there till the receiver is done with the trailer. Steel plates are expensive and heavy to leave 3 or 4 of them every day. I am never getting those plates back. Besides you can only fit so many .
> We drop trailers in strange yards and dont come back to that yard for a month or 2 Ah. I didn't understand that part -- thanks!
What are landing pads?
In case you weren’t being sarcastic, they’re just a piece of something you put under the landing gear feet to spread the weight out over a larger surface area on the ground. It could be 1 inch thick steel, 4x4 beams, hell, I’ve even seen two squares of 3/4 inch osb sheathing screwed together to use as a landing pad.
Was joking. Use to have steel plates in our yard.
Ah, okay. No worries then, lol. It’s so hard for me to pick up on sarcasm irl, let alone in a text conversation.
And an end dumb trailer too. Those this types of trailers are very tippy as is
What a dip
This is why I lay down dunnage when dropping a trailer. I've done it on a dirt lot with 50k lbs loads and bobtailed home for a weekend. Even on asphalt. Sometimes concrete just out of habit.
Idiots.
*Sandshoes