London's Buried Diggers

http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2014/06/bizarre-secret-london-s-buried-diggers

by wormold • 12 years ago

144 41 12 years ago

joshvm• 12 years ago

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

sean-duffy• 12 years ago

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?

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

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)

VLM• 12 years ago

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.

sp3323• 12 years ago

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

sambeau• 12 years ago

Further reading:

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

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

sp3323• 12 years ago

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

kentwistle• 12 years ago

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

firstOrder• 12 years ago

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.

Stratoscope• 12 years ago

These diggers are the very definition of a sunk cost.

mocko• 12 years ago

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

jrockway2• 12 years ago

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.

ZenPro3• 12 years ago

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.

baha_man• 12 years ago

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."

paul_f• 12 years ago

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.

sbierwagen• 12 years ago

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

dyadic• 12 years ago

That's what we call them in Britain

DanBC2• 12 years ago

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...

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

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...

colanderman• 12 years ago

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

jeroen• 12 years ago

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."

bobdvb• 12 years ago

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.

ccleve• 12 years ago

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.

webnrrd2k• 12 years ago

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.

wazoox• 12 years ago

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.

tim333• 12 years ago

"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...

DanBC2• 12 years ago

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/...

read• 12 years ago

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...

cstross• 12 years ago

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.

tritium• 12 years ago

  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.

London's Buried Diggers

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