a farm accident
Jun. 20th, 2020 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/37KTCVK
I’m just gonna stick a whole bunch of photos behind the cut here.
We had a dramatic but ultimately not so bad farm accident of our own this morning. One of the apprentices was doing the morning animal chores, and she’d stopped, as usual, next to the barn just up the hill from the main area. (The livestock barn, where the sows have their water and feed and shelter, and their pasture extends out along a run from it, overlooks the spot next to the road where the house is just opposite the “granary” building that’s used for the farm store and the CSA pickup. There’s a parking lot for four cars right at the base of the hill next to the farm road.)
I was walking through the barnyard; Farmkid had just run off with a trusted friend. Suddenly someone, not a child, started screaming, and I thought it was Farmkid’s friend, playing– she’s a grown woman and they play games where they yell and holler. But I only thought that for an instant, because it was so blood-curdling. I ran out to see, and just then, there was a horrible rending CRUNCH/BOOM, and then a patter of liquid.
I saw the apprentice running down the hill, and it was clear she’d been screaming. And then I saw the chore truck, which had landed on top of two cars in that parking area. And I realized immediately that the truck had popped itself out of park and taken off down the hill.
But no one was in it– the apprentice had been on the back, and had jumped off when it started rolling. And the two parked cars were uninhabited, and in fact belonged to two farm employees– one of whom was the apprentice who’d just chased the truck down the hill. And the cars had stopped the truck before it could take its gathered speed and smash into the granary building and possibly knock it off its foundations– it was built around 1825 and is just on a pile of stones at the far corner, and in that room is the brand new fridge, and in the main area was a group of people picking up their CSA shares, and my sister supervising the process.
So no one was hurt, and a great deal of property damage was avoided, and the distraught apprentice kept apologizing but she did nothing wrong; if she hadn’t had it in park, she wouldn’t have been able to get out of it. Fortunately she’d had it faced down hill, so when she jumped off the back, it was rolling away from her and she could land safely and not get run over.
You have to see the pile to believe it.
It was a literal pile-up of cars. Our players: a late 90s Ford F-150 piece of shit with two 100-gallon water tanks on the back and two huge full baskets of eggs in the front seat, both of which were violently hurled at the dashboard on impact while the water tanks sent water sloshing everywhere as their tops blew off in the collision. A 2003 Toyota Avalon that the truck landed on the hood of. And a 2000 Subaru Outback whose front driver’s side quarter-panel took the truck’s entire fender off.
[image description: the three above-described cars, with the Toyota and Subaru facing away from the camera and the Ford between them, unevenly slanted, with its running board wedged on top of the hood of the Toyota and its opposite tire wedged against the front quarter-panel of the Subaru.]
Behind the truck: a hefty new-dug drainage ditch that had served to launch it slightly upward as it reached the parking area. Background: the barn it was parked next to.
Directly to the right, off-camera, of the 2000 Subaru Outback was a customer’s brand-new, still-shiny, not-even-dusty-yet extended-cab pickup truck, like, fresh off the lot. It was entirely unscathed, not even a drop of water hit it.
We called the cops, as insurance dictates. And we went and got the tractor, figuring we’d haul the cars out and see what was what. But the cops said we shouldn’t move the cars yet, let them finish their statement, so we dithered, and hooked up the tow chain to the Subaru, but then reconsidered. (If we pulled it out, the truck would probably fall off the Toyota, right?)
Sister administered shots of whiskey to both employees whose cars were involved, figuring that was correctly medicinal. (In the immediate aftermath, the sobbing apprentice had suddenly gasped, “I still gotta feed the pigs,” and had climbed onto the back of the truck and hauled off the buckets of feed she’d been up there retrieving when the thing had started rolling, and ran up the hill carrying the heavy feed-buckets, because it wasn’t the pigs’ fault and they needed to eat. It was pretty impressive actually. She’s a good egg.)
We then thought maybe we’d pull the Toyota out first. Only… where does one attach a tow chain to a Toyota? I Googled it, and watched a series of uninformative videos, while Farmsister just called our dad. He wasn’t sure, and then pointed out that we didn’t have to pull with the tractor: on the back of that tractor was a brand-new winch, which had a max capacity of 4500 pounds. Probably that would work. Oh yeah.
[image description: the running board of the Ford, resting atop the extremely dented hood of the Toyota, whose grille is also cracked in half. The corner of the Toyota’s windshield is visibly spiderwebbed and a pole from the electric fence is wedged in the crumpled metal of the Ford’s running board.]
“Why don’t I come over?” Dad said, and Farmsister said, “Would you??”
So we adjourned for the 20 minutes it took Dad to show up with my two nephews in the car, both wide-eyed and excited at this fantastic conundrum. To her credit, their excitement went a little ways toward cheering up the apprentice, who really is a lovely young woman, and had, in fact, done no wrong in any of this. (There’s no curb to turn the wheels toward, the whole thing’s downhill, you can’t really get the truck sideways there, it slopes every damn direction. Park should do it, and has been sufficient for years, and now is not, so I guess we’ll have to start getting creative.)
Dad showed up and looked it all over. “Ah,” he said, “I hadn’t realized BIL isn’t here,” because BIL is the sort of person who would also be able to apply a great deal of presence of mind to solving this problem. It wasn’t that us assembled here couldn’t figure it out, but all of us were distracted– CSA pickup was still going on, and I was ostensibly babysitting two small girls, and the apprentice was distraught and the livestock manager was distraught and they’re both so young, and anyway. Dad gave it a good thorough looking-over, and said, “What’s the biggest jack you have here?”
Farmsister went and dug out the big hydraulic floor jack, which took some finding, and there was much discussion, and the nephews and I went and found some cinder blocks and big scraps of wood.
Dad jacked the truck up so its weight wasn’t resting on the Toyota, and then got into the Toyota and drove it backward. Incredibly, it started, and it ran just fine, and the truck, with its rear wheels chocked, rocked downward a little but did not move significantly, and most importantly, didn’t scrape any chunks off the Toyota as the Toyota went backward.
[image description: the Toyota is mostly out of frame to the right, having been driven backwards, and the Ford is hovering in midair, held up by a heavy-duty jack atop a pile of wooden chunks. Beyond it the Subaru is still in place.]
Then Dad put another jack under the axel, holding it a little lower, and removed the first one to let it down a bit. It settled, and he then had to re-do the jack to get the second jack out, and then he let it down further. Eventually, all four wheels were resting on the ground. The headlight lens assembly got peeled off the truck during this process, but no additional damage to the Subaru happened. The real worry was that the Subuaru’s front axle would be broken, which would total the car, but we couldn’t tell yet.
Then Farmsister got into the cab of the truck, started the engine, and got on the brakes while Dad removed the chocks from the wheels.
Then she drove it forward, turning the wheels as best she could. The apprentice who owned the Subaru folded in the mirror, and it was spared any further carnage. The truck came to rest not touching the Subaru, and the pile was officially untangled.
[image: the Ford on the left, the Subaru on the right, and the apprentice who’d had to bail off the moving truck standing between them inspecting the damage to her car. She is a woman with black hair in a knot on top of her head wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sandals, and she’s had a hard day. Farmsister’s head is just visible craning her neck to look out the driver’s side window of the truck, which she’s driving. The truck’s fender is bent so much it’s behind the front wheel in one spot.]
But, miracle of miracles– she got into the Subaru (and a panel fell off the door, but the door works! and the window rolls down!) and started it and backed up, cranking the wheels, and they went, they turned, and she backed it out, turned it, and re-parked it. The axel is not broken and the car is driveable and actually seems to have only mild cosmetic damage to the hood and the front quarter-panel.
So. All in all, that was more excitement than anyone really needed, but especially in light of the serious farm accident up the river yesterday, it was really quite fortunate all around.
(”You’ll be able to laugh at this soon,” Farmsister had said, and an hour later, the apprentice made a joke and laughed and said “Oh my gosh it only took an hour to become funny!” … which is good because she’s on chores this weekend and we need her to still use that truck and do all the same things, only maybe don’t park on the hill but I don’t know how you’re supposed to do chores without parking that truck on a hill since this whole farm is on a slant.)
(Also I consoled her with the wild tale of How I Burned My Own Yurt Down With Me In It And Literally Five Different Fire Trucks Showed Up But Only One Of Them Could Get Across The Bridge So Mostly Two Whole Fire Companies Sat In The Driveway For A While And I Stood Around A Bunch. She was like, oh, you’re right, that’s way worse!)
She was looking at her car and was like, “Shit, I might not even fix this.”
The livestock manager also surveyed the damage and said “holy shit you guys, all of these cars are old enough to vote,” which, like, that’s true, holy shit.
I just can’t believe nobody got hurt. What luck.
And Dad thanked us for the Father’s Day Gift, of giving him such a fun logic puzzle to solve. (It was easier, he said, since none of the cars were his.) (The nephews were duly quite impressed.)
Happy Solstice! What kind of omen this is I can’t tell, but it’s got to have been one…
I’m just gonna stick a whole bunch of photos behind the cut here.
We had a dramatic but ultimately not so bad farm accident of our own this morning. One of the apprentices was doing the morning animal chores, and she’d stopped, as usual, next to the barn just up the hill from the main area. (The livestock barn, where the sows have their water and feed and shelter, and their pasture extends out along a run from it, overlooks the spot next to the road where the house is just opposite the “granary” building that’s used for the farm store and the CSA pickup. There’s a parking lot for four cars right at the base of the hill next to the farm road.)
I was walking through the barnyard; Farmkid had just run off with a trusted friend. Suddenly someone, not a child, started screaming, and I thought it was Farmkid’s friend, playing– she’s a grown woman and they play games where they yell and holler. But I only thought that for an instant, because it was so blood-curdling. I ran out to see, and just then, there was a horrible rending CRUNCH/BOOM, and then a patter of liquid.
I saw the apprentice running down the hill, and it was clear she’d been screaming. And then I saw the chore truck, which had landed on top of two cars in that parking area. And I realized immediately that the truck had popped itself out of park and taken off down the hill.
But no one was in it– the apprentice had been on the back, and had jumped off when it started rolling. And the two parked cars were uninhabited, and in fact belonged to two farm employees– one of whom was the apprentice who’d just chased the truck down the hill. And the cars had stopped the truck before it could take its gathered speed and smash into the granary building and possibly knock it off its foundations– it was built around 1825 and is just on a pile of stones at the far corner, and in that room is the brand new fridge, and in the main area was a group of people picking up their CSA shares, and my sister supervising the process.
So no one was hurt, and a great deal of property damage was avoided, and the distraught apprentice kept apologizing but she did nothing wrong; if she hadn’t had it in park, she wouldn’t have been able to get out of it. Fortunately she’d had it faced down hill, so when she jumped off the back, it was rolling away from her and she could land safely and not get run over.
You have to see the pile to believe it.
It was a literal pile-up of cars. Our players: a late 90s Ford F-150 piece of shit with two 100-gallon water tanks on the back and two huge full baskets of eggs in the front seat, both of which were violently hurled at the dashboard on impact while the water tanks sent water sloshing everywhere as their tops blew off in the collision. A 2003 Toyota Avalon that the truck landed on the hood of. And a 2000 Subaru Outback whose front driver’s side quarter-panel took the truck’s entire fender off.
[image description: the three above-described cars, with the Toyota and Subaru facing away from the camera and the Ford between them, unevenly slanted, with its running board wedged on top of the hood of the Toyota and its opposite tire wedged against the front quarter-panel of the Subaru.]
Behind the truck: a hefty new-dug drainage ditch that had served to launch it slightly upward as it reached the parking area. Background: the barn it was parked next to.
Directly to the right, off-camera, of the 2000 Subaru Outback was a customer’s brand-new, still-shiny, not-even-dusty-yet extended-cab pickup truck, like, fresh off the lot. It was entirely unscathed, not even a drop of water hit it.
We called the cops, as insurance dictates. And we went and got the tractor, figuring we’d haul the cars out and see what was what. But the cops said we shouldn’t move the cars yet, let them finish their statement, so we dithered, and hooked up the tow chain to the Subaru, but then reconsidered. (If we pulled it out, the truck would probably fall off the Toyota, right?)
Sister administered shots of whiskey to both employees whose cars were involved, figuring that was correctly medicinal. (In the immediate aftermath, the sobbing apprentice had suddenly gasped, “I still gotta feed the pigs,” and had climbed onto the back of the truck and hauled off the buckets of feed she’d been up there retrieving when the thing had started rolling, and ran up the hill carrying the heavy feed-buckets, because it wasn’t the pigs’ fault and they needed to eat. It was pretty impressive actually. She’s a good egg.)
We then thought maybe we’d pull the Toyota out first. Only… where does one attach a tow chain to a Toyota? I Googled it, and watched a series of uninformative videos, while Farmsister just called our dad. He wasn’t sure, and then pointed out that we didn’t have to pull with the tractor: on the back of that tractor was a brand-new winch, which had a max capacity of 4500 pounds. Probably that would work. Oh yeah.
[image description: the running board of the Ford, resting atop the extremely dented hood of the Toyota, whose grille is also cracked in half. The corner of the Toyota’s windshield is visibly spiderwebbed and a pole from the electric fence is wedged in the crumpled metal of the Ford’s running board.]
“Why don’t I come over?” Dad said, and Farmsister said, “Would you??”
So we adjourned for the 20 minutes it took Dad to show up with my two nephews in the car, both wide-eyed and excited at this fantastic conundrum. To her credit, their excitement went a little ways toward cheering up the apprentice, who really is a lovely young woman, and had, in fact, done no wrong in any of this. (There’s no curb to turn the wheels toward, the whole thing’s downhill, you can’t really get the truck sideways there, it slopes every damn direction. Park should do it, and has been sufficient for years, and now is not, so I guess we’ll have to start getting creative.)
Dad showed up and looked it all over. “Ah,” he said, “I hadn’t realized BIL isn’t here,” because BIL is the sort of person who would also be able to apply a great deal of presence of mind to solving this problem. It wasn’t that us assembled here couldn’t figure it out, but all of us were distracted– CSA pickup was still going on, and I was ostensibly babysitting two small girls, and the apprentice was distraught and the livestock manager was distraught and they’re both so young, and anyway. Dad gave it a good thorough looking-over, and said, “What’s the biggest jack you have here?”
Farmsister went and dug out the big hydraulic floor jack, which took some finding, and there was much discussion, and the nephews and I went and found some cinder blocks and big scraps of wood.
Dad jacked the truck up so its weight wasn’t resting on the Toyota, and then got into the Toyota and drove it backward. Incredibly, it started, and it ran just fine, and the truck, with its rear wheels chocked, rocked downward a little but did not move significantly, and most importantly, didn’t scrape any chunks off the Toyota as the Toyota went backward.
[image description: the Toyota is mostly out of frame to the right, having been driven backwards, and the Ford is hovering in midair, held up by a heavy-duty jack atop a pile of wooden chunks. Beyond it the Subaru is still in place.]
Then Dad put another jack under the axel, holding it a little lower, and removed the first one to let it down a bit. It settled, and he then had to re-do the jack to get the second jack out, and then he let it down further. Eventually, all four wheels were resting on the ground. The headlight lens assembly got peeled off the truck during this process, but no additional damage to the Subaru happened. The real worry was that the Subuaru’s front axle would be broken, which would total the car, but we couldn’t tell yet.
Then Farmsister got into the cab of the truck, started the engine, and got on the brakes while Dad removed the chocks from the wheels.
Then she drove it forward, turning the wheels as best she could. The apprentice who owned the Subaru folded in the mirror, and it was spared any further carnage. The truck came to rest not touching the Subaru, and the pile was officially untangled.
[image: the Ford on the left, the Subaru on the right, and the apprentice who’d had to bail off the moving truck standing between them inspecting the damage to her car. She is a woman with black hair in a knot on top of her head wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sandals, and she’s had a hard day. Farmsister’s head is just visible craning her neck to look out the driver’s side window of the truck, which she’s driving. The truck’s fender is bent so much it’s behind the front wheel in one spot.]
But, miracle of miracles– she got into the Subaru (and a panel fell off the door, but the door works! and the window rolls down!) and started it and backed up, cranking the wheels, and they went, they turned, and she backed it out, turned it, and re-parked it. The axel is not broken and the car is driveable and actually seems to have only mild cosmetic damage to the hood and the front quarter-panel.
So. All in all, that was more excitement than anyone really needed, but especially in light of the serious farm accident up the river yesterday, it was really quite fortunate all around.
(”You’ll be able to laugh at this soon,” Farmsister had said, and an hour later, the apprentice made a joke and laughed and said “Oh my gosh it only took an hour to become funny!” … which is good because she’s on chores this weekend and we need her to still use that truck and do all the same things, only maybe don’t park on the hill but I don’t know how you’re supposed to do chores without parking that truck on a hill since this whole farm is on a slant.)
(Also I consoled her with the wild tale of How I Burned My Own Yurt Down With Me In It And Literally Five Different Fire Trucks Showed Up But Only One Of Them Could Get Across The Bridge So Mostly Two Whole Fire Companies Sat In The Driveway For A While And I Stood Around A Bunch. She was like, oh, you’re right, that’s way worse!)
She was looking at her car and was like, “Shit, I might not even fix this.”
The livestock manager also surveyed the damage and said “holy shit you guys, all of these cars are old enough to vote,” which, like, that’s true, holy shit.
I just can’t believe nobody got hurt. What luck.
And Dad thanked us for the Father’s Day Gift, of giving him such a fun logic puzzle to solve. (It was easier, he said, since none of the cars were his.) (The nephews were duly quite impressed.)
Happy Solstice! What kind of omen this is I can’t tell, but it’s got to have been one…
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 09:01 pm (UTC)My kind of cars!
no subject
Date: 2020-06-21 12:03 am (UTC)I'm SO glad that no one was hurt, and that the property damage was towards the smaller end of the possible range.
Re creativity about hill parking, some thoughts:
a) If the truck will be going into the shop for repairs, anyway, I'm guessing it'll get checked to see if they can diagnose why being in Park no longer held it in place on a familiar slope?
b) If the truck isn't obviously the problem, has the slope gradient changed, recently? Has the amount of friction provided by the slope's surface changed? Do you know if the truck's driving wheels rolled or slid? Was the load in the truck heavier than usual?
c) Would creating a semi-permanent parking spot for the truck be compatible with the reasons it parks there? If so, maybe get someone with a bulldozer to cut into the slope enough to make a flat spot? I realize erosion might be an issue,with this idea, unless you added a retaining wall on the cut and a concrete pad on the flat, which I'm sure would be expensive. However, it might be worth it, if no good alternative comes up.
c) Has your dad already expressed an opinion about the usefulness of heavy-duty wheel chocks, on the slope in question? They at least might be locally available and fairly cheap.
d) Midway between the chocks idea and the make-a-level-place idea would be installing a semi-permanent parking stop without leveling &/or paving the spot, using something like the following, which can be ordered with 18" galvanized steel spikes to drive into the ground: [link]
...Yeah, your remark about getting creative kind of gave me my own thought puzzle, thinking back to long-ago physics classes. Feel free to either pass along or disregard, as appropriate...
no subject
Date: 2020-06-22 02:27 am (UTC)a) The truck is definitely not going into any shop; we repaired it by ripping off the bent chunk of fender, and it's back in service. It pops out of Drive sometimes, so it's likely that popping out of Park was inevitable.
b) no, the gradient hasn't appreciably changed, the truck is just sort of shitty.
c) no, the gradient is the farm road, it can't really be changed without making the hill non-traversable, which isn't going to work for, like, the entire rest of the farm's operations. It's just the dirt road that goes past the barn. The barn, I might mention, despite being nearly-brand-new construction, does not have a floor of any kind, and is made of wood sunk directly into dirt. This is not that high-budget an operation, there is no poured concrete anywhere on this farm even though BIL has a background in working in concrete-- ah, I lied, the sidewalk into the house is poured concrete and it took them five years to get that, even after I fell off the pavers, so like. Not holding our breath, here, for terrain adjustments.
d) Possibly they will begin carrying wooden chocks or a brick or something, or possibly backing the truck into the barn entryway; various of the other implements get chocked whenever parked, so it's not unlikely. I don't know what was done today. Probably a brick or cinder block.
There's a five- to eight-year backlog of Urgent construction projects around here. Improving the chore truck's parking ability is pretty low on the list, especially since as this is a pasture operation, most of the hills the truck gets parked on through the course of chores change between one and seven times per week, as the pastures get rotated to fresh grass. While it wouldn't be as much of a disaster if the truck ran away down a hill into a ditch somewhere on the farm's back forty, it would still be a disaster, so any changes would have to be to the truck, not to the farm road right outside the animal barn.
BIL almost lost the water wagon into the creek last year or the year before when the chocks he'd put in place were sufficient for the empty weight, but not the full weight; as he filled the tank, it suddenly hit a tipping point and got heavy enough to push the chock out. He was bright enough to realize he couldn't catch it, so he stood and watched, and the heavy brush caught it at the edge of the streambed, fortunately. So now we know-- you really really really gotta brace that water wagon. The new one, usually he only fills it while it's hitched to the tractor. (It's 1100 gallons, so about 8000 pounds when full, but the tractor has weighted wheels so it's 10k lbs.)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-22 06:33 am (UTC)