Librarianon

Your local Librarianon

  • He/Him

Writer, TF Finatic, Recohoster, and Game dev. Wasnt able to post here as much as I liked, but I'll miss it and all of yall. Till we meet again, friends!


alyaza
@alyaza
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ceryl
@ceryl

The first thing is that 85K per tire is easily lowballing it. Depending on the tire type and current market demand I've seen tires go as high as 150K apiece.

The scale of these trucks is massive, and the book (understandably) doesn't go into detail about it when it says "due to the terrible friction their loads generate", but I want to stress that a tire of this scale catching on fire is due to flex. The tires are so massive that the very act of turning under load causes the material to bend hard enough against itself that it creates enough heat to self-combust.

It's not uncommon on these jobs to see a 797 simply running over a pick-up truck in the wrong place, because a Ford F-150 is a Hot Wheels cars in comparison to the mining trucks that keep the oil sands going, and the mining trucks have about as much maneuverability as a large boat and a fraction of the visibility. Fatalities are mercifully rare only because you have to be stupider than dogshit to not be paying extreme attention whenever you're around these things.

Like the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam, it's hard to imagine the scale of the trucks until you've seen one in person, and there are hundreds of them operating across the oil sands. It gives you an inkling of the scope of the money the oil sands pulls in knowing that each of these trucks is run ragged. Practically nonstop. Transmission breaks? Replace the transmission. Engine breaks? Replace it too. Bed worn out? There are highly-skilled welders whose entire job is to simply rebuild them. Assuming no catastrophic failure, these trucks are used up until their frame is so full of microfissures that it can literally not physically handle the work any longer.

This is about around 150,000 hours of operation, or seventeen years of continual operation, or about ten engine replacements.

So when you hear about how readily these companies use up these expensive, high-in-demand and specialized machines, it's a lot easier to see how easily they use up the people (holy shit camp life is miserable), and how the environment couldn't' possibly be on their radar.

Go Berta.


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