Talking on the phone while driving ???

Engineering Question
Conditions:
An excavator weighing 22 tons is on top of a lowloader trailer and heading east on the Trans-Canada Highway in Alberta.
The extended shovel arm is made of hardened refined steel and the approaching overpass is made of commercial-grade concrete, reinforced with 1 inch steel rebar spaced at 6 inch intervals in a crisscross pattern layered at 1 foot vertical spacing.

Question:
When the shovel arm hits the overpass, how fast do you have to be going to slice the bridge in half?
(Assume no effect for head wind and no braking by the driver)










I couldn't solve it either...but who cares; the pictures are great! A very good advert for Hyundai Excavators especially that it is a long reach boom model as well. Must be a strong sucker. Hope the driver is insured, because that bridge is stuffed.


Cost to remove the excavator, then the old bridge, then build a new one including the resurfacing of the roads top and bottom, and all of the other things including traffic diversions and anything else that is involved, around $3.5 million plus. Not counting the excavator, truck and trailer. There's another $.5 million plus.

P..S. The driver was on his cell phone at the time... so the insurance company won't pay on any of that. They had better take his passport. Or maybe he will just do what every other prick does these day and declare himself bankrupt and let the taxpayer pay for his very expensive phone call.

That trailer looks suspiciously like Swishy's flash one.

Does Swish have a Canadian Cousin?

There's something not quite right here, if you look at the pics carefully.
It seems the boom "erupted" from the bridge, it shows it cutting into the bottom half of the bridge, but the top photo shows the boom way, way above the whole bridge.

Remember a couple of years back the same thing happened at the Pumicestone road bridge, just north of Caboolture, excavator, big sucker too, travelling on a low loader south didn't make it under, but it just snapped the chains and stayed in the same place as the low loader kept moving.

Went past 5 minutes after it happened, while everyone was still scratching their heads, engineers looked at he bridge and concluded it was unmarked and undamaged.

One small insurance point.

I was a Specialist Motor Underwriter (probably insured some of the trucks on here in my day) and I've never heard of a mobile phone exclusion in any motor policy anywhere in the World.

Particularly in 2006.

i agree busman the angle of the boom is wrong in the picture looking from the top unless it is taken from the other side but it dont add up cheers whale

Looks OK to me.
That's one long reach sucker.
He almost made it under, head of the main boom struck about 2'-3' into the side of the structure and would have punctured straight through.
Then the dipper arm would have been flung upwards, the bucket striking the underside of the carriageway.
From then on it was rip and tear and one hell of a hydraulic leak.
The photo taken from the bridge deck looks dramatic but the stuff on the pavement is mostly shrapnel. The deck isn't ripped from one side to the other but it sure does have a good sized hole in it.