An article in last Saturdays Irish Independent reads as follows:- Bulldozer found 13 years later A BULLDOZER reported stolen in 1996was found buried under a fairway on a Texas golf course. Investigators located the bulldozer at Canyon West golf course in Weatherford when a former worker contacted authorities after noticing part of the Dozer while fertilising the course. Sorry it a Backhoe. http://cbs11tv.com/local/Weatherford.Golf.Course.2.954871.html Bulldozer Found Buried On Weatherford Golf Course Reporting Jack Fink WEATHERFORD (CBS 11 News) ― Investigators made an unusual discovery at a golf course located in the 100 block of Club House Drive in Weatherford. But they found it beneath one of the fairways. Now, detectives are looking to see if the golf course owners committed a crime 14 years ago. The holes at Canyon West Golf Club attract groups of golfers each day, but it was a different kind of hole that brought investigators to the course in late February. Acting on a tip, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Tarrant Regional Auto Crimes Task Force and the National Insurance Crime Bureau started digging up the 13th fairway. Agents found a 9,000 pound Ford rubber tire loader buried 10 feet underground. Special Agent Tommy Reed with the National Insurance Crime Bureau said, "We recover vehicles daily, but something like this is obviously unusual." Parker County court records obtained by CBS 11 News show that sources told investigators that the golf club owners, Stan Mickle and his father, Wes Mickle, used the stolen equipment to build the golf course 14 years ago, and later buried it. Agents are also looking to see if the Mickles reported the loader to their insurance company as stolen. "Thirty-five percent of all insurance claims are fraudulent in some way or another," Reed said. Court records show that, about three years ago, a former golf club employee was spraying fertilizer on the fairway when he noticed a yellow metal uncovered by erosion. The employee told investigators, "I asked Stan [Mickle] about it and he told me to cover it." The worker told agents, "I covered it with soil a few days later. Stan put large rocks on top of the area." Records show that sources are afraid of telling what they know "due to concerns of physical harm" or "for their safety." However, one person close to the Mickles reportedly told investigators, "The only knowledge I have is what Stan Mickle himself has told me. We have a stolen bulldozer buried on number 13." "Brand new, something like that would have cost around $40,000 to $50,000," said Reed. "Depending on the equipment, it could have been more. Right now, it's worthless." Investigators are now combing through reports of stolen heavy equipment both in Texas and out of state. Both Stan and Wes Mickle could face charges of theft and insurance fraud. Neither have returned calls seeking comment. (© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.) Apologies for posting it here but it said BULLDOZER. Stock
Thats some story. I have a freind who worked for a contractor, and he took "their" motor grader over there and did some blade work. They didnt bury theirs, I still see it working from time to time.
I've heard similar stories, especially with all the strip mining that went on in this part of the country. Serves them right for being too lazy to bury it deeper. (I'm only being partly sarcastic there. If it's a case of theft or insurance fraud, they deserve jail, but getting caught cause they were too inept to hide the evidence well enough is poetic justice.) :thumbsup
Well, luckily they did NOT find a "bulldozer. News people wouldn't know a bulldozer from a milk jug.
Sure they would. Milk jugs are not yellow.
Wow this is hilarious!:laugh I actually have heard of people hiding farm equipment and bulldozers in the wooded areas on their several hundred acre farms to avoid them being repoed:avid, but literally burying a stolen loader on a golf course takes the cake.:falldownlaugh
Crooks
Usually when I "bury" a machine it is just stuck. Pj
Same here. Than if you are like me you are to stupid to cover it up and report it stolen. Instead go in after it and do what ever it takes to get it out.
It looked to me like a shuttle loader with a power box on the back. My buddy has one just like it to prep driveways for paving. I wonder if there's a statute of limitations on something like this?
Wow that has to be the funniest and dumbest thing ive seen yet...
blew up the vid to 200%....its a 445A ? i'm not familiar with the skip-loader's number's Pj
Maybe that's what happened. They stuck it bad and didnt wanna pay for more equipment to get it out so they just covered it up. I have given thought to that a few times myself. LOL. Actually, last year one of the guys on our crew buried a 320 cat excavator badly. After nearly a week of us trying to get it out with other excavators, dozers with winches and many many mats we had to surrender and call the insurance company. All that was left visable was the boom and the lights were on. It was really sad to watch it die a slow death as the battery's finally went dead about 4 days later. The insurance company guy said to torch the visable part of the boom off and leave it there but the EPA guy said Hell no get it out! After about 2 months of drying time they hired a guy to come out and get it. He put in 10 well points around it and pumped all the water out then dug it out with another machine. After some pressure washing, all fluids changed, new battery's and computers he fired it up and drove it on the lowboy. We just watched with our jaw's on the ground when it fired up. They paid him 20k to get it out and let him keep the machine. It had 700 hours on it.
I'll say it again "Better to be born lucky than rich" of course a little knowhow goes a long way....
why cant i find jobs like that....
WOW! Maybe this explains the enormous dinosaur bone finds in Alberta. I could never understand how thousands of animals go to the same place to die. Maybe they all walked into a bottomless bog? Bottomless really means bottomless in your part of the world!
I was in the columbia icefields recently. Apparently during WW2 a Jeep was lost in a crevasse. They expect to see it pop out of the glacier in a thousand years or so.
and here I've been digging out all the equipment that I've buried....
I was working for an 'Ol Boy' out in the Mojave Desert back in '86. All of his equipment were POS. One TD-20 he had was completely wore out. Always breaking down, needed tracks, sprockets, idlers, transmission wasn`t long for this world either. Blew out a track adjuster ram and threw a track. That was the final straw for him. He got mad and told me to bury the D**n thing. I asked him if he was serious and he said "D**n Straight I`m serious". I waited til the next morning and asked him again. Once again he said bury it and get rid of it. So I did. Gouged a BIG hole in the ground, rigged it with a cable and dragged it into the hole and covered it up. As far as I know it`s still there. Was kinda out in the middle of nowhere so not many knew about it....
Dozer lost A fitter mate recounted a story of a D8 that got lost 'intransit' for 6 months in New Zealand. Apparently the machine was loaded onto a rail wagon for transportation but never turned up on site. The paperwork was a bit of mess & it was discovered parked in a remote siding, nowhere near its correct destination.
I have been known to bury the odd pice of equipment. 1 barge 1 Bedford truck 1 Chamberlain tractor 1 Zetor tractor 1 International AWD6 Industrial front end loader 2 or 3 cars and utes and a couple of trailers, amongst other things. RnR.
I remember being told about that D8 The Ministry of Works brought I think about 6 for them selves. 5 turned up. No 6 ended up somewhere in Central Southland & parked behind a building & took 6 months for someone to figure out what this piece of yellow metal was
In 68 or 69 Cat shipped a 779 Electric End dump to Twin Buttes AZ in a 5 truck convoy, when it didn't show on the date it was supposed to Tracers were sent out and 779 was found in Butte MT It finely showed up three weeks late
lots of the dams around here and ditch bank are full of cars pickups and tractors, last fall on a job for repairing stream banks we even found a school buss, the excavator operator said his dad had drove quite a few cars to dam job and the cars did not come home with him. I find it hard to throw out an old POS nonless onme that drives.
how do you keep this from happening what is the best way to lock up stuff we have a skidsteer. I always park a truck in front of the trailer and always have the trailer with something behind it so if will have to look like they are doing something that they are not supposed to. We live in a neighborhood so hopefully the good ole neighborhood watch will help. I always take the keys out. What are other ways to keep it safe aj
a guy by my house tried to do that they stole my grandpas 955 trackloader did the job and as they drove it in to the hole he pulled up and beat the crap out of the owner of the company (this wasnt recently in the70s0 serves that ******* right
I know of a Manitowac Crane that got where it was suppossed to go but the railroad kept saying it was lost for 6 months. Owner kept telling to to pay him for it if they lost it. Railroad never paid, finally realized 6 months later what happened.
Thats an amazing story Galute! How much do you think that machine was worth?
i worked on a local job about 5 years ago and 2 aston martin cars were supposed to be buried as a insurance fraud.looked but never found them nick......
You can lose anything in a Carolina Bay if you try In early '50s my father ran a d4 fire plow for International Paper and he and all the other operators got a panicked radio summons to Kilsock Bay (a Carolina Bay, not a body of water) A 2 day old d8 bedding tractor was sinking in the ground; that evening they hooked 6 d4 winches to it and couldn't shake it. Over the next several days they brought several d8s & 9s and everything else they could think of but it slowly sank until the engine and dash were below the dirt and they gave up. A couple of months later he and another man dug about 4' down with shovels and didn't hit it. On land I inherited about 15 miles from there my grandfather showed me (30+ years ago)the very rusted cab roof and smokestack of an early 20th century logging locomotive that had run off the rails. My brother and I couldn't find any sign of it this year.
How are they trying to charge them with theft AND insurance fraud? If they stole it they wouldnt have been able to report it on their insurance?
Simple, they reported it stolen even though they knew it location,secondly claimed from the insurance as the inured party.
How coincidentally this happened. I worked out there for a week. I was replaced by supposedly the owners brother. I was saddened to be replaced by the owners brother. That was a hard time for me, but if family needs help what are you going to do. Of course create a spot to help him out. Not right but it would be my instinct too. Got to help the fam. Seeing this makes me know now what happened then was protection for me. I bet workers were called in for witnesses. The course wasn't that great of golf course anyways.
1. Why is every piece of construction equipment in the news or TV/movie called a bulldozer?? 2. Reminds me of the time in the 90s as well working in Central Florida someone stole a D5 dozer from us, made police report, a week later it showed back up, transport picked up the dozer by mistake and took it to Texas!!!
I just read an article about the sale of the Mickle's ranch and golf course. The two properties sold for $9,298,000.00.
Amazing that you ran across this thread all these years later. Sort of a small world situation.
A farmer friend DID lose his beater truck....it got left behind in the field after planting. Sat there for darn near 3 weeks. Had a rain day so I stopped by his shop on my way home from work...walked in, he pointed at me.....SO THATS WHERE I LEFT IT! Lol Would have found it when they sprayed for weeds.....lol Ed
A housing development was being built on what was a swampy wooded area in my hometown. A D8 dozer was parked one night, the next morning only the top of the exhaust stack was visible. By the time they got heavy recovery equipment on site it was completely gone. It's probably still there.
Outfit here in Ga. left a roller on a vacant spot after they had paved the road. As luck would have it years later they again won the bid to repave the road. Found the roller covered up with kudzu as they were going to use that vacant spot again as a staging area. Checked it out replaced the batteries and put it back to work on the same job it got left at.
had a concreteing outfit near me who hired an excavator from a national hire company to prep a site and 6 months later they realised it was still at the site . they had clocked up 6 hrs on it and the bill was around $ 60,000aus dollars
Good pressure wash and that thing is off to Richie Bros. And this story was 15 years ago. Joe H
There is a DOE nuclear research complex out here on the desert that has been around since the 50's and still very active today. Tons of bad sh!!t buried out there. There are stories of a lot of expensive heavy equipment buried out there that has been contaminated with radiation. Don't know what is true but I can believe it happening.
Friend worked at a Nuke research facility years ago when they closed part of it. Huge machine shop was scrapped, he cried for months as it slowly disappeared. Joe H
Talk of losing a dozer always reminds me of this photo.
No shallow graves with that thing around. Joe H
When dad worked the woods in the 50's and 60's, they had a term called "Eagle rocking a dozer". A contractor was losing his ass making payments on a new 6 I think, and he was working up on Eagle Rock. he claimed to have "lost control" and bailed off before it ran off the cliff and was totalled.
I remember hearing stories from the old timers. At one particular, long gone, Cat dealership in Portland, about various prototype components being buried behind the facility. After, being field tested. Caterpillar, Inc didn’t want to risk the chance of the scrap being intercepted, or deal with the logistics.
Much dioxin based herbicide was used to maintain the 8” Haines-Fairbanks Pipeline, back in the day. One old timer recalls burying drums of Agent Orange, as directed, in an area which is now considered the city center of Tok. Much Hijinks soon followed. Talk about having that buried in your backyard! Don’t drink well water in Tok. I think the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scratched around a little, then went home and wrote this nice report. https://www.poa.usace.army.mil/Portals/34/docs/civilworks/publicreview/TokACS2007_PubNotice_EA_unsigFONSI.pdf
Oh yea its true savanna river plant has walked all manner of heavy equipment and huge lift cranes in holes and buried them. Bought a hoe from oak ridge plant and asked um if it was contaminated olboy looked at me and smiled and said it doesnt glow at nite like it used to.
Nige you reckon the fella had his seatbelt on
You have to hope so, otherwise he would have had a very interesting ride.
Old thread - I wonder what happened to Stock? Haven't heard from him in a while.
Apparently a lot of equipment used to build the Alaska highway was buried because it was too expensive to bring it back.
To most uninformed people, everything painted yellow is a bulldozer.
We had a logging & excavation contractor. By local standards he was a big operator. Many of his logging contracts were on US Forest Service land. USFS specifications included what size equipment you skidded logs with. Dozer specifications were taken from the specs. for a John Deere 350. At one purchase he bought ten new JD 350. Larry had a out of state landowner he did work occasionally. After ten years or more, he was going to cut off another area. He sent a driver to deliver machines there. Driver radioed back: "What do you want me to do with the one already here?" A dozer had been forgotten from the last time they had worked there. It was worse for weather, got dismantled for parts.
Seems like they went out of their way to make sure when reading the report nobody would miss the fact that there was 'No significant Impact' from the incident...lol
Funny but true.
Something similar to original topic Gubment agency I retired from leased a Dozer for 01 month, paid for delivery of course. 11 months later the company that leased the Dozer asked if they were ready to return because they had someone that wanted to rent it and had been waiting a while. One of the more intelligent persons there located the Dozer and it was promptly returned. Of course there was payment for the other 11 months and the Dozer had been used 20 hours. Never did find out who forgot to return the Dozer or how much it cost. Who cares,,,, the taxpayers paid for it anyway is the way most people that were employed, not worked there, just employed there thought. I am sure no one got in trouble for the oversight, They probably got a Promotion. Unfortunately, that is just one of many stories that you can not just make up. The amount of money that the gubment throws away would make you sick.
I heard some stories about the Alaska pipeline days, about dozers lost in the muck, and even ware houses with new snap on tools pushed into big pits and buried, they didn't want cheap tools on the market. Also heard about after ww2 factories barging special machines and tooling into places like the great lakes. Don't remember how many years after the big one. Lots of waste.
Oh’, yeah. Roll your 9,000 gallon fuel tanker on the Dalton Hwy? Just bury it. This one was found at mile 403 in 1993. https://dec.alaska.gov/Applications/SPAR/PublicMVC/CSP/Download?documentID=38461&fileName=1971_OMS%20135-2%20Recon%20Report_F.pdf There is so much crazy stuff buried up here. Especially, on the abandoned WWII military facilities and Cold War infrastructure.
It gets crazier. I know an old boy in FBX, John Reeves, that dug up a ol’e frozen wooly mammoth and ate it. Said it tasted bad. Watch his Joe Rogan interview some time.
The general public is not aware, but the railroads are self insured......... This means when a train car(or several) derail and are damaged out here in the west, the new autos are simply drug off into a freshly dug pit, crunched by the pipelayers used to recover and move the now scrap iron, and covered up. When I was a kid, the railroad buried four train cars worth of brand new Cadillac cars in the desert
The report says that somebody dug up a tanker and fuel spill in 1993, but the report concludes with: "The OMS 135-2 site reconnaissance did not find soil staining or magnetic anomalies which would indicate the presence of a buried tanker at the former material site in the vicinity of the ADEC site coordinate." Which tells me that somebody did an excellent job at reburying said tanker . . .
I know, right? Nobody wants to be there. It’s like, “ yup, we gave it the old college try, ain’t no tanker buried around here”. Let’s get the hell back to ANC while the weather is holding “. lol.
I’ve posted this before, about some archaeologists finding a buried cache of explosives along the Alaska Highway near Tok. This was in the Fall of 23. Look how well preserved it looks.
Does TNT degrade over time like Dynamite? I know little about explosives, but have come across small amounts of Dynamite left behind in sheds for years, was told that it sweats as it ages and gets very unstable. I'm guessing TNT doesn't going by that picture, otherwise someone was playing a very dangerous game.
The Air Force EOD people came to deal with it. https://www.eielson.**.mil/News/Dis...eod-dispose-of-98-tnt-blocks-near-tok-alaska/
A little TNT should help speed up the archeological dig . . .
A buddy of mine was on the recent fiber optic job that ran down the Richardson, Alaska Highway, to Beaver Creek POE, into Snow Mexico. Much of the last stretch was over the old Haines-Fairbanks pipeline ROW. They dug up all sorts of things. I’ll have to share some of his stories.
Also heard about after ww2 factories barging special machines and tooling into places like the great lakes. Don't remember how many years after the big one. Lots of waste. A friend of mine did that after WWII. He ran one shift of the plant building those 36 cylinder radial engines. They loaded the tools on barges and took them out on the lake and dumped it. The thinking was the companies that had made all those tools would go out of business if that stuff was allowed on the market. Joe H
An acquaintances of mine grew up in Cold Bay during the 80’s. He dug up and collected enough WWII scrap copper to pay for two years of college. Even paying for the container to Seattle.
This is the barge story I was talking about, I guess I had seen you post this before. 36 cylinder radial engine, I don't think it ever flew, wow waste of tools etc. Engine liquid cooled XR7755 and 36 cylinders.