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London's Buried Diggers

newstatesman.com

144 pointswormold41 comments

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Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_Sho...

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt3ZQxKl_ZQ)

My favorite version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1R5vDG2Tg (and the Madeline reading is even better)

I have trouble believing this story.

For one thing a used digger would be worth far more than $10,000 USD, and for another there are strict building codes that must be met. I'm sure a used digger would not be considered legal fill-dirt material and they would be forced to dig it out and re-do the whole lot if it was buried in place. I remember when I was a kid in California the apartment I lived in filled in a pool and they had to bust up the concrete. Someone threw an old couch or stuffed chair or similar down in the hole and they just threw the dirt over it. The city found out and made them dig it out and fill it with proper fill-dirt. I believe the reason was that something might eventually be built on top of that area and it had to be up to code.

I suppose it varies from place to place. My uncle put a car, a fridge and I don't remember what other stuff to fill up the hole under his terrace, and as professional mason considered it a perfectly normal and usual way to save concrete.

"London's Very Own Urban Legend: There Are NOT Hundreds of JCB Diggers Buried Beneath The Capital's Streets.."

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/06/london-urban-lege...

A selection of mini-diggers (the first hit on the first websearch) showing some proces below £10,000

This is the machine that is claimed to be buried.

http://plant.autotrader.co.uk/used-plant-machinery/category/...

It depends on what you are digging.

A long expensive digger can be tough to resell. All six diggers[1] used for the Channel Tunnel[2] were buried[3], and their cost was in the order of millions each.

What else could you do? Put a 750-foot, 15,000-tone tunnel digger[4] on eBay?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

[3] http://www.nysun.com/new-york/after-work-done-drills-likely-...

[4] http://www.therobbinscompany.com/en/case-study/the-channel-t...

I've heard this before... Oh yeah, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel http://blog.acton.org/archives/67697-lessons-creative-destru...

This is the underwater dive pool referenced http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/08_01/38MHouseES_468x477...

I call BS on this. No sources and burying all that engine oil and diesel would contravene a mountain of regulations.

http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/5459717

This article derides the other for not having any sources, but still doesn't actually have a source that says, "no, there are zero buried diggers". There's a screenshot of Twitter and some guy saying "my company wouldn't do that".

I think we still have no idea if this is done or not. Someone call a real journalist.

You are asking someone to prove a negative?

That is ludicrous. Imagine your statement applied to any other scenario such as law...

Prove the person didn't commit the murder or he gets life.

It is precisely why those alleging a hypothesis must prove the thesis, it is not the job of everyone else to disprove an unproven hypothesis.

That escalated quickly! Yes, the fact that they can't find a source that says, "oh yeah, we bury those things all the time!" is certainly suspicious. But on the other hand, I don't trust any of the blogs involved to actually dig up a source. Instead they just post screenshots of Twitter, which doesn't really add any information.

In your mind how would that source verify JCB's are not there?

They would have to ground-penetrate the entire City of London and Greater London conurbation.

Downvoted for being right again. Oh HN - you are nothing if not predictably petty. :-)

Surely the diesel and oil could be removed very easily?

Anyway, this comment on the article you reference is interesting:

"The truth is somewhere in between, if the JCB's were mini diggers and secondhand it would make economic sense to bury the kit and not a lot of space would be lost..."

Also this quote from http://www.itv.com/news/london/2014-06-06/hundreds-of-jcb-di...:

"The diggers used are tiny little machines and they can be lifted out with a block and tackle. There is always an exit strategy for the equipment."

I'm going to agree, this strains credibility. If they can get the materials in to finish the basement, they can get the digger out. Any sane engineer could figure this out.

If you have the money, why not? Though surely the diggers could just be dismantled and taken out?

Clive James recorded a wonderful and amusing Point of View (BBC Radio 4) on the subject of rich people and their basement palaces.

http://www.clivejames.com/point-of-view/underground

This same thought occurred to me, surely rather than wasting the whole digger, there must be some salvageable parts that can be easily carried or hoisted out of the holes and sold as spares?

Suppose you are one of London's 72 resident billionaires, and you're making 5% or so on your income.

You can pay for this digger in an hour, by spending that hour sitting on your ass, and it's not that you will be re-spending that money in your lifetime anyway. Fill it in or have someone salvage it, do whichever is quicker: you've got other things to do with your life and one of those things is to enjoy your new pool.

(Whether true or not, this acts as a good illustration of the scale of income inequality)

Chances are you didn't get to be a billionaire by throwing away $5k if it's easily recoverable.

> Chances are you didn't get to be a billionaire by throwing away $5k if it's easily recoverable.

Even better chances are you probably did a basic cost analysis and didn't just go based on hunches.

And best chance yet, you probably inherited the billions.

Or you inherited it? Or your a middle eastern minor prince, or your a Russian who was in the first place at the right time and got a good deal ( ;-) ) on some Soviet privitaisation.

Not all billionaires pulled themselves up by their bootstraps

Chances are you don't get to be a (self-made) billionaire without throwing away $5k here and there.

If you're spending your time saving easily recoverable $5ks, you might get to be a millionnaire but you will never get to be a billionaire: it's totally irrelevant on that scale.

Equivalent statement: You don't get to buy a house without picking pound coins up off the street.

Why would the billionaire in question even be concerning himself with the transportation of some machinery? This decision would be taken by whoever was in charge of the excavation.

I'd have to agree. Just tell someone "there is a fully functional digger down, it's free, but you have to get it out."

Hell, people will come and haul away scrap steel from the bottom of a lake. A digger worth $10,000? 4 guys and 8 hours and each of them just made $2500 for a day's work.

I don't think someone catering to exclusive clientele would bring "scrap riff raft" into a property. It seems ludicrous and completely credible to me.

I think it says more about the extremely high cost of strict planning regulation. Not everything is about inequality.

I suspect whats called a "digger" by journalists is just a stripped frame. Anything that can be unbolted or cutting torched off has been removed, but the frame might be too heavy.

There is too much space for fraud... If you own a fleet of diggers and 3 minutes with a wrench and some bolt cutters can get you a $500 hydraulic control center or a $300 pump, its gone. You might tell the boss or insurance agent the whole thing was a complete loss written off and thats how it will be recorded on the bill, yet there's a new huge pile of spare parts with no serial numbers back at the warehouse... And any evidence is under a concrete slab.

Someone explain why you couldn't just build a plywood ramp and drive it out?

Or winch it up an incline too steep to drive?

Somehow, there needs to be a hole large enough to extract the dirt, bring in the structural elements, bring in the new foundation and the concrete for the pool, and bring in any large pieces of furniture. And large enough to get the digger in in the first place. Surely if you're bringing heavy stuff in, you can get heavy stuff out.

This story has to be nonsense.

Digging in London ised to be difficult, especially if tou were digging a tunnel. There was an extra step where the security services could veto your plans (without telling you why).

Not sure if that still happens. Here's why it used to happen: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/oct/18/london-underground...

I could see the cost/benefit trade-off going that way, after all one of the multi-million dollar tunnel boring machines digging the Chunnel was left entombed [1].

That said, I have to wonder if you couldn't use a balloon to extract the digger or even a simple gantry crane over the excavation. A bit of prep before you start digging and you'd save your $15K.

[1] "In December 1990, the French and British TBMs met in the middle and completed the Channel Service Tunnel bore. In all of the tunnels the French TBM was dismantled while the U.K. TBM was turned aside and buried." -- http://www.therobbinscompany.com/en/case-study/the-channel-t...

Reads like not one but two machines (both the British ones) were left entombed.

Three, according to wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel#Tunnelling

"Six machines were used, all commenced digging from Shakespeare Cliff, three marine-bound and three for the land tunnels."

The front of the TBM that was extracted is sitting along side the M20 motorway near the Eurotunnel site. It used to have a "for sale" sign on it.

Worth noting: regular housing in London currently changes hands for £1000-1500 per square foot (that's US $1600-2400 per sq. ft.). In Knightsbridge and Belgravia you can add a zero to the end of that; these are areas where Eric Schmidt couldn't afford to buy a modest family house. Most of the home-owners are oligarchs, sheikhs, and sovereign wealth funds speculating in London real estate futures.

  But developers are stumbling on a new kind of obstacle 
  as they burrow deeper still: abandoned diggers from the 
  last round of improvements.

I say we dust off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

These diggers are the very definition of a sunk cost.

First world problems.

Decades from now, under a portrait of Lenin, this article will be one of the readings of the lesson in a social studies class.

What, is this author using "digger" to mean "excavator", or something?

That's what we call them in Britain

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