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Watch your outrigger pad setup on soft ground, learned that one the hard way
Three weeks ago I was setting up a 60 ton at a site off Highway 9 near Mount Vernon and the ground looked solid after two days of no rain. Put my pads down and started swinging a 4,000 lb load when the rear left pad sank about 8 inches into what turned out to be a filled trench from an old drainage job. Got lucky the load was low and I caught the tilt on the bubble right away, but it scared the hell out of me. Anyone else run into hidden soft spots like that and do you always probe the ground first or just go off the soil report?
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seth_shah1mo ago
Honestly man you kinda made your own problem there. Soil reports are only as good as the guy who did the drilling and they only test the spots they test, so a filled trench 20 feet from the bore hole is invisible on paper. The report said solid because the sample they pulled was solid. That doesn't mean the whole site is solid, it means that one hole was solid. Probing takes two minutes with a piece of rebar and it would've caught that soft spot before you ever swung a load. Going off the report alone is how you end up on your side in a ditch.
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