Dump Truck Rollover - BLInspirations

When we moved to our present location in January 2020, there was a new development being started a block from our street. For the past 18 months we watched as they cleared the land, dug trenches for utilities, graded for a street, installed curbs sidewalks, and built houses. Even though the street has not been paved, many of the houses have been sold and are already occupied. During this time there has been almost constant activity involving heavy equipment: two excavators, two articulated off-road dump trucks, both bucket and blade bulldozers, large wheeled bucket loaders, and several skid steerers.

This past spring there was a lot of activity moving top soil to spread around the newly constructed houses and one March day we noticed the body of one of the off-road dump trucks had apparently tipped over beside one of the new houses. Only the dump body tipped over, spilling its load, while the cab remained upright. As we watched, an excavator and a bulldozer approached the dump truck and teamed up to return the truck body to an upright position. From the time the bulldozer and excavator first approached the truck, it took about two minutes to return the body to the upright position and for the truck driver to drive it away. The driver remained in the truck the whole time and at the adjacent house, two men on a scaffold who were installing siding were watching the operation. (The school busses visible in the top-center of the featured image are a mile away behind the high school.)

I should note here that an articulated dump truck consists of two separate but connected parts: a cab which is mounted onto the front part of the chassis and a dump body which is mounted onto the back part. The two parts are joined by an articulation joint located just behind the cab that allows the two pieces of the chassis to move independently. This articulation joint provides steering through the use of hydraulic cylinders that pivot the cab with respect to the dump body chassis. The two sections can also rotate around the articulation joint with respect to each other, providing flexibility when driving over rough and uneven terrain. There is a close-up photo of the articulation joint in the Additional Images section below.