And now, from the "Little Engine That Could" dept.

[Pox_Eclipse]

Does this look familiar to anyone?



http://www.snopes.com/photos/automobiles/lumber.asp

The materials were loaded at Home Depot. The Home Depot store manager made the customer sign a waiver before loading. Both back tires are trashed. The back shocks were driven up through the floorboard. On the roof are many 2X4s, 4X4s and OSL sheets of lumber. The load isn't all that meets the eye either. In the back seat were ten 80-pound bags of concrete! They estimated the load weight at 3000 lbs. The car is a VW Jetta with FL plates and the guy said he was headed for Annapolis!

[jraabe]

It's probably fortunate that he will not be able to get up to freeway speed and have all that twine break loose!

[glenn-k]

This guy should have been removed from the gene pool before he was allowed to create any offspring. :-/

[Amanda_931]

I've never done anything that bad.

But I did once have a load of 10ft drywall on the old Datsun truck (a couple of inches over 6 feet long) that just about cost me steering while it was loaded.  And I seem to remember a couple of sheets of plywood on the hood of one car or other that slid down onto the hood in rush-hour traffic.

And more than once the 8-foot bed on the current truck has proved too short for 12-foot things--like, strangely a plastic road "tile" or culvert, or (and this went out when we were going about 5-miles an hour) a utility pole cut to about 12 feet, leaving a couple of right impressive dents.  In both cases I was told that there was no problem, it couldn't pop out.    

I now keep a couple of tractor tire sidewalls in there to hold stuff down.  Works great for things like a mixed load of lumber and OSB or plywood.

[Sassy]

Wellll, you shoulda seen Glenn moving all my worldly belongings from my 4 bedroom house to his house right before we got married... in the back of his Dodge pickup!  He built up the sides with wood slats - talk about Beverly Hillbillies, the furniture must have been piled 10 feet high at least - you know, "Mr. I can do it myself..."    And he only lost a couple of my pillows from my bed, must have flown off & hit the driver behind him...    

Gene pool?  

[glenn-k]

It was a truck and it was not overloaded - legal limit is 14'  

[peg_688]

It was a truck and it was not overloaded - legal limit is 14'  

  Yet it still was a leaky load , therefore illegal

  How about the guys who loaded that car , we had a case here in Island county where the yard loaded some bags of cement in a horse trailer with a fork lift , the lady went off the road , downa steep inbankment , was injuried when to Harbor view (large hospital in Seattle )recovered , was released , then died a few days later of a blood clott, (an-u- ris-um) can't spell it.

   Not sure of the outcome but the lumber yard will no longer load POV's with thier fork lift , only large flat bed trucks are loaded that way.


 Scary and sad what some folks will do while driving with , ah , over loaded , leaky , loads . Ya wonder if they have the sense ta get outta the rain.  

[glenn kangiser]

Not even gonna give me a break, eh PEG? :-/

Well - now I can try to justify it by saying - "Well - I'm not any worse than the garbage trucks around here who provide about 90% of the trash leaked along the highway near the dump."  You know this is America-- I can't simply say I was wrong and take the blame for it.  Hey -- we have attorneys for that kind of thing --- we never have to accept responsibility for any screw ups -- it was always someone elses fault.

[PEG688]

Sort of the same problem the lumber yard had / has , I'm not sure that case is settled . The husband sent the wife to get X # of bags of cement , she said load it , they did , she lost control of the rig pulling the trailer , excess speed might have been involved , lots I do not know about the case. The results she is dead , yard will no longer load evrn one pallet of any thing in a POV . Lawyer are richer  

So "who" was at fault ? The husband , the wife , the lumber yard people ? Where's that sword ? Lets cut the baby in 1/2!

[glenn kangiser]

I can see instability issues with a load in the back of a horse trailer -- trailer may steer the car --who's at fault?

Only thing sure as you said is that lawyers will get their cut from someone and you will have trouble getting loaded. :-/

(By the yard-- with the forklift)

[benevolance]

Well with a lot of these situations common sense would solve most of the problems...

But Common sense is neither sensible or common these days.

I have hauled a cord and a half of green wood on my pickup...And yeah it was pretty overloaded...It was cut fresh off the stump...Not a processed cord either...the good old fashioned 128 cubic foot cord..Trailer hitch was dragging on the pavement...

It is scary here in South Carolina...Trailers do not need brakes, or lights, or fenders....Unless they are commercial....It is red neck heaven down here.

[John Raabe]

Glenn:

When I got married to my nurse, and we left Boston for the west coast, I bought a roof rack and a big heavy canvas tarp. I built a plywood platform onto the rack and loaded all her stuff on top of a 1970 Dodge Dart. We called it the elephant and it was about that big.

We got some odd looks and few slurs about "Okies" but it was a great three week honeymoon across the U.S. and there was never a problem from the "elephant". (It helps that we sold all the books and heavy stuff first and had things like a wicker rocking chair up there.)

Still have the tarp!... and the nurse.

[Jimmy C.]

I guess that sort of thing is not uncommon.

[glenn kangiser]

Well, John -- I still have the nurse but not her pillows. :-/

I guess I'll never be able to live that one down.

She thought it was going to be more than one load -- maybe the pillows were just too much for it.

[Amanda_931]

I was at Home Depot this afternoon (boy do I hate driving 50 miles each way just to return something that I'm going to need tomorrow) and noticed that every time they have a forklift in the loading area they've got a spotter with two orange flags.  It seems really kind of worthless to me (but I've noticed that they don't always have the best forklift drivers there--when I was more in practice I occasionally was tempted to show them how to do it!).

I did wonder if it had to do with that particular incident.  They were still piling on the drywall on somebody's little trailer.  More than I thought was worth-while, but maybe they didn't have too far to go.

[glenn kangiser]

I had heard of customer smashings at Home Depots - looked it up a bit to see if it was true.  Here's a bit of the reason for the spotters and the spot cleaner uppers..

http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2003/02/24/story2.html?t=printable

[Sassy]

Back to Glenn moving my stuff... when I think about it, I had a lot of STUFF & I still can't quite figure out how he & my son packed all that STUFF into the back of the truck   - I was just thankful that I didn't have to do it   - and everything was in good shape (except the pillows  , but hopefully someone who needed pillows found them).  

So, John, sounds like you guys did about the same thing... good memories   .

[Jimmy C.]

I had heard of customer smashings at Home Depots - looked it up a bit to see if it was true.  Here's a bit of the reason for the spotters and the spot cleaner uppers..

http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2003/02/24/story2.html?t=printable

This scares that bejebus out of me.. I have been in home deopt 3 or 4 time per week for the past two years!

This is a web site a mother made after losing her 3 year old daughter ina home depot accident.  She posted the police photo of the pallet of counter tops that spilled to the floor.

http://jmh3.angelcities.com/story.html

[Amanda_931]

None of that looked particularly new, and the flags around forklifts in the loading zones are.

When I was driving a forklift (mostly a stand-up reach truck) it was in an environment where I was competing with several hundred people for aisle space.  Which may have made the other people more sensitive to us, but I really can't remember anything but hearing about long ago serious--or potentially serious--incidents.  But even if they did take people like me who had never even thought about being on a forklift before, we soon learned because we were driving most of our shifts.  I have a feeling that while Home Depot may send their people out for certification on a forklift, they don't get the hours of working in tight spaces that we had.  

That said, for years they have closed aisles when a forklift is working in one.