Did this "bucket" of water really destroy the car or is there video trickery going on here?

[astro]

That's a lot of water, but would it really demolish the car that way?

[Captain Morgan]

1 gallon of water weighs about 9 pounds, I have know how much that bucket holds. But say 500 gallons that's 4500 pounds landing on top of the car. So it seem legit to me.

[Bosstone]

Guesstimating/ballparking like mad, which can probably be corrected by someone with more direct knowledge:

It's hard to tell which of these excavators the one in the video is, but most have backhoe capacities from 2 to 4 cubic yards. I stink at eyeballing, but the width of the backhoe in the video has to be 4 to 5 yards long, so let's say 4 cubic yards of water.

There are about 200 gallons in one cubic yard, so that's about 800 gallons of water, or around 7000 pounds. Depending on how much water it's really holding, that's 3-4 tons. Not all of it hit the car, but what did is certainly going to be sufficient to flatten it like it did.

[Dog80]

I had seen the original full video and I guess it is still around in Youtube. If memory serves me correctly, the capacity of the bucket on that excavator was something like 20 cubic meters. Thats 20 tons of water!

Also previously they did the same with a smaller excavator so the car was somewhat weakened.

[StrangerThanFiction]

Here's a different angle, from which you can see that's it's an R 9800, which is Liebherr's largest mining excavator.

According to their website, the bucket's capacity is 42 cubic meters, so you're looking at 11,950 gallons of water, which weighs 92,593 lbs.

[TriPolar]

Originally Posted by StrangerThanFiction

Here's a different angle, from which you can see that's it's an R 9800, which is Liebherr's largest mining excavator.

According to their website, the bucket's capacity is 42 cubic meters, so you're looking at 11,950 gallons of water, which weighs 92,593 lbs.

Now I'm impressed with how well the car stood up.

[Bosstone]

Originally Posted by StrangerThanFiction

According to their website, the bucket's capacity is 42 cubic meters, so you're looking at 11,950 gallons of water, which weighs 92,593 lbs.

Oh wow, I really underestimated it.

[StrangerThanFiction]

Only by an order of magnitude

[Simple Linctus]

Was the way that some of the water looked blue down to dye or due to whatever the effects are that make it look blue when it's in the sea or a lake?

[Rysto]

I am amused at the steady progression of estimates in this thread. It's like watching a game of telephone...

[Machine Elf]

Originally Posted by astro

That's a lot of water, but would it really demolish the car that way?

Water, by virtue of its mass, can deliver surprising devastation. As you're seeing from the math in this thread, there's no reason to doubt that the car in the video was indeed destroyed by that water drop.

Here's a water balloon destroying a porta-john from a similar height.

I recall hearing that pilots of wildfire-fighting aircraft need to exercise caution about placing their drops, as it's possible for the mass of water to kill firefighters on the ground if the drop occurs directly onto them.

[ftg]

Originally Posted by Bosstone

Oh wow, I really underestimated it.

"So we got it two thousand percent wrong. Anybody can make a mistake."
Jeff Goldblum as Jim Watson in The Race for the Double Helix