Scott Swanson
A crane lifted a city backhoe out of the South Santiam River Friday morning after the piece of equipment inexplicably rolled out of a city yard into a 20-foot-deep pool of water Tuesday afternoon.
A crew from Forslund Crane Service in Albany started setting up to retrieve the backhoe at 8 a.m. Friday. A contract diver for Forslund descended into the swirling water to hook chains to the 16,000-pound yellow Case backhoe, and a few minutes later the 110-ton crane hoisted it out of the river.
The sequence of events began approximately 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 15, when the approximately 20-year-old backhoe started rolling from the old city maintenance yard on the north end of 9th Avenue, where it had been parked, with the shovel down.
Public Works Director Mike Adams said no one knows why the machine started rolling.
“We’re doing our review,” he said Monday, adding that the operator of the machine was being interviewed by the maintenance supervisor. “As far as exactly what happened, I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. “
Linda Blanchard, who lives nearby, appeared to be the only witness. Blanchard said she was on the riverbank Tuesday afternoon while her Labrador retriever, Sable, swam in the river, when the backhoe rolled by.
“I heard metal clanging, intensely loud,” she said. Turning around, she saw the backhoe “coming really fast, bouncing. I yelled, ‘Is anybody in there?’”
The machine bumped into some rocks and trees on the edge of the riverbank, which was about 20 feet above the water, then teetered over, she said.
“I thought it would stop when it hit the rocks, but it went over the edge. I just heard a kind of a ‘plop.’ It wasn’t very loud. I looked for my dog because he was swimming, then I called 9-1-1.”
Firefighters Eli Harris and Chris Barnes motored up in the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District’s rescue craft, and Harris used a mask and snorkel and a rake to look below the surface of the churning water to make sure no one was in the backhoe’s enclosed cab.
Officials said they were concerned that a youngster might have climbed into the cab and started the machine rolling.
The window of the cab broke while Harris opened it in the current, and it rapidly became apparent that no one was inside.
“We knew we didn’t have any way of pulling it out, so I just called the crane people to come take a look at it,” Adams said.
Forslund’s estimate for removal came out to be “about $10,000 for an eight-hour job,” he said. That included specialty commercial divers subcontracted by the company.
He said he anticipated the actual cost would be lower, since the actual time required to lift the backhoe out was less than two hours.
After the dive team hooked up the chains, the crane slowly lifted the machine out of the water and set it on a city flatbed trailer, to a smattering of applause from onlookers.
“Not many days do you see a swimming backhoe fly,” quipped one spectator as the eight-ton backhoe swung through the air toward the trailer.”
Adams said the U.S. Corps of Engineers Foster Dam operators reduced the river level while the recovery operation was under way.
He said on Monday he hadn’t gotten word yet on the likelihood of the backhoe being salvageable.
A glass window in the cab was broken during SHFAD’s efforts to determine that no one was inside, he said, and there was damage to one of the rear wheels. He said there was no indication that the machine had leaked any fluids while in the river.
“It’s a nice, tight unit,” Adams said. “Right now, we have a guy going through, draining the fluids and drying it out. We’ll just kind of take it from there. Everybody I’ve talked to thinks it could very well be salvageable.”