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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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...
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_Sho...
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt3ZQxKl_ZQ)