The day a crane dropped a palm tree through my truck bed

Last Tuesday I was wrapping up a job in Santa Monica and a crane operator slipped his grip on a 40 foot palm. The whole trunk landed right in the back of my Ford Ranger, crushed the bed flat but somehow missed the cab. Has anyone else had equipment fail on them in a way that felt almost too lucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

thompson.xena1mo ago

Holy crap, that's insane! Something similar happened to me a few years back (well, not with a palm tree, but still). I was at a construction site and a forklift dropped a whole pallet of bricks about two feet from my parked car. The pallet just shattered on the ground, but my car was totally fine. Sometimes you get lucky in the weirdest ways, you know? That crane operator must have felt awful, but I bet your heart dropped when you saw that truck bed.

phoenix8451mo agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, I actually read something the other day about how crane operators have these insane safety protocols for exactly this reason. There's this whole like pre lift checklist thing they're supposed to go through, but I guess sometimes stuff just goes sideways anyway. Reminds me of that video I saw where a crane snapped a cable and a steel beam just dropped right through the roof of a building under construction. Nobody got hurt, but it was terrifying to watch. It's wild how that pallet of bricks missed your car, kind of like those stories where a tree falls but somehow misses every house on the street. The universe has a weird sense of humor sometimes, I swear.

eva_rivera25d ago

What gets me about near misses like that is how we never really know if it's luck or some kind of pattern we can't see. @thompson.xena your brick story is wild too, makes you wonder how many times a day stuff like that happens that we just don't hear about. The universe has a funny way of showing us how little control we actually have.