Hard to know the real cause without essentially doing an investigation including site inspection and operator statements.
Have personally witnessed only one situation that bad. Many years ago working on a cable laying crew there was a young guy with a shiny new D7N LGP working nearby that was regrading a lot that had a little creek at the bottom; the kind of creek that was permanent but that’s about all you could say for it. We were all pretty enthralled by his machine that dwarfed our biggest 75hp Case ditcher and most of us hadn’t seen one of the high drive, triangle track crawlers as they were fairly new at the time. First day he filled in the creek and left around 5:00 with the crawler sitting near where the creek used to be. We all thought that was a bad idea and our crew boss, Pat, a crusty old ex-Marine and ex-convict who said maybe 10 words on a talkative day, told him he should move it away from the creek on his way out. The crawler operator told him to stick to cable plowing as he was clueless about dozers. Next morning we came back and saw the creek had exacted its revenge. The creek wasn’t fully back yet but there was a line of soupy mud where it was fighting it’s way back to life, the crawler was on its side about half buried in the soup. The now humble and very upset operator asked our crew boss if we could pull him out with the ditcher. Obviously the ditcher wouldn’t have pulled him out if we wanted to try, which we didn’t. Even if I could accurately quote my boss’s response it wouldn’t be printable here and if I took out all the expletives there wouldn’t be anything left. Our job took us on down the road. No clue how he got it out. All I know was it was still there a week later and the creek was flowing again by that time. If I’d just looked at photos of the mess he was in the first day it sank and knew nothing else, it would be pretty difficult to figure out what happened.
I sometimes wonder what became of Pat. Can’t recall his last name if I ever knew it. Learned a few things from him about complaint handling. People would sometimes get upset when we moved their mailboxes out of the way even though we always put them back. First guy that came out with a pistol trying to run us off, he sent me back to the van and the other three guys stayed out with Pat. Pat explained right of way laws calmly to him. Guy wasn’t buying it so Pat changed tactics, explained they’d all pulled time in prison and none of them minded going back so either take his pistol and go back inside or they’d stick it where the sun don’t shine and he knew he couldn’t shoot all of them before they did it. That worked. Complaint handling at its finest. Asked him after why he sent me to the van. He said very matter of factly, “Because you have a chance for a future. We don’t.”
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